others mixing red or
white paint for the adornment of the nose, cheek, or eye, as custom or
taste may decide.

I could not rightly discover whether these marks were simply directed by
caprice, and assumed or laid aside at pleasure, or whether they were
worn in compliance with some imperative custom, and having a
translatable meaning, as some historians assert. Certain is it that I
have noticed a little _Choctaw belle_, with whom I had established a
sort of eye-flirtation of many days' standing; on one morning appealing
to my taste by an insinuating streak of white lead over each of her
bright eyes; on the next, giving my heart a stab from under a crimson
half-moon; and on the third, killing me quite by a broadside from each
chubby cheek, the right having at me with a ball of fiery red, the left
exhibiting one of jet black.

The costume of these people, when divested of the eternal filthy
blanket, is showy, and at times even becoming, and pleasing; bright
colours, fringes, tags, beads, and feathers of the ostrich, parroquet,
and eagle, constituted the raw material which the taste natural to the
sex, and the love of finery inherent in the squaw, has to work upon.

JOURNAL RESUMED.

_Monday, March 16th._--During the last three days the weather has been
warm, but not oppressively so: last evening a light shower of rain was
followed by a lovely night. I am leading a dissipated life here, and
engaged for every day I can yet count upon--must prepare for flight from
this Capua, but how? that's the question! since up the Mississippi I
won't steam again, that's poz!

Visited a noble packet called the Shakspeare, in which I feel hugely
tempted to take passage, although by the route newly opened through
Florida there is greater certainty, albeit with a good deal of hard work
to calculate upon.

_17th._--St. Phaudrig's day. Engaged to dine with the sons of the saint.
Rain falling in torrents, no stirring out; by the afternoon a deluge
threatens us, the streets are turned to rivers, and our neighbour swamp
is become a lake, above which the naked cypress-trees, hung with their
sombre drapery of moss, tower like the masts of some goodly navy whose
hulls lie sunk beneath. Boats will soon be required, for every gutter is
become a branch of mother Mississippi.

About three o'clock P.M. it subsided a little, and we were able to get
through in a well-horsed carriage to the French Theatre, in the
ball-room of which our rend