itories had sent their representatives to our
steamer. Suckers from Illinois, and Badgers from the lead-mines of
Missouri--Wolverines from Michigan, and Buckeyes from Ohio--Redhorses
from old Kentuck, and Hunters from Oregon, stood mingled before us, clad
in all sorts of fantastical and outlandish attire. One had a
hunting-shirt of blue and white striped calico, which made its wearer's
broad back and huge shoulders resemble a walking feather-bed; another
was remarkable for a brilliant straw-hat--a New Orleans purchase, that
looked about as well on his bronzed physiognomy as a Chinese roof would
do on a pigsty. Winebago wampum belts and Cherokee mocassins, jerkins of
tanned and untanned deer-hide, New York frock-coats, and red and blue
jackets, composed some of the numerous costumes, of which the mixture
and contrast were in the highest degree picturesque.

In the middle of this group stood a personage of a very different
stamp--a most interesting specimen of the genus Yankee, contrasting in a
striking manner with the rough-hewn sons of Anuk who surrounded him. He
was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of
grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into
innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright
reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually
shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded,
to some chests that lay upon the deck before him, and again from the
chests to the men; his whole lean, bony, angular figure in a position
that made it difficult to conjecture whether he was going to pray, or to
sing, or to preach a sermon. In one hand he held a roll of pigtail
tobacco, in the other some bright-coloured ribands, which he had taken
from an open chest containing the manifold articles constituting the
usual stock in trade of a pedlar. Beside this chest were two others, and
beside those lay a negro, howling frightfully, and rubbing alternately
his right shoulder and his left foot; but nevertheless, according to all
appearance, by no means in danger of taking his departure for the other
world. As the Yankee pedlar raised his hand and signed to the vociferous
blackamoor to be silent, the face of the former gradually assumed that
droll, cunning, and yet earnest expression which betrays those double
distilled Hebrews, when they are planning to get possession, in a
quasi-legal manner, of the dollars of their fellow-c