ds above Baton Rouge, well
assured that the opinion of all would be in favour of the choice I had
made. By some eccentric working of that curious machinery called the
mind, I was more thoughtful than a man is usually supposed to be upon
his wedding-day; and I received the congratulations of the guests, went
through the _obligato_ breakfast, and the preparations for departure, in
a very automatical manner. I took scarcely more note of the nine shots
that were fired as we went on board the steamer, of the hurrahs shouted
after us from the quay by a few dozen sailors, or the waving of the
star-spangled banners that fluttered over the poop and forecastle--of
all the honour and glory, in short, attending our departure. I was busy
drawing a comparison between my first and this, my last, voyage to the
Red River.

It was just nine years and two months since I had first come into
possession of my "freehold of these United States," as the papers
specified it. Five thousand dollars had procured me the honour of
becoming a Louisianian planter; upon the occurrence of which event, I
was greeted by my friends and acquaintances as the luckiest of men.
There were two thousand acres, "with due allowance for fences and
roads," according to the usual formula; and the wood alone, if I might
believe what was told me, was well worth twenty thousand dollars. For
the preceding six months, the whole of the western press had been
praising the Red River territory to the very skies; it was an
incomparable sugar and cotton ground, full sixteen feet deep of river
slime--Egypt was a sandy desert compared to it--and as to the climate,
the zephyrs that disported themselves there were only to be paralleled
in Eldorado and Arcadia. I, like a ninny as I was, although fully aware
of the puffing propensities of our newspaper editors, especially when
their tongues, or rather pens, have been oiled by a few handfuls of
dollars, fell into the trap, and purchased land in the fever-hole in
question, where I was assured that a habitable house and two negro huts
were already built and awaiting me. The improvements alone, the
land-speculator was ready to take his oath, were worth every cent of two
thousand dollars. In short, I concluded my blind bargain, and in the
month of June, prepared to start to visit my estate. I was at New
Orleans, which city was just then held fast in the gripe of its annual
scourge and visitor, the yellow fever. I was in a manner left alone;