er weigh and put to sea at night. "She's gone, Peter, you
observe," remarked Captain Searle, as some piece of duty called me near
him. "I'm glad you are not on board her; and I hope neither you nor I
may ever fall in with her again."

From New Orleans to Belize, at the mouth of the Mississippi, is about
one hundred miles; and this distance, with the aid of the current and a
favourable breeze, we accomplished by dusk, when we prepared once more
to breast old ocean's waves. These last hundred miles of the father of
rivers were very uninteresting, the banks being low, swampy, and dismal
in the extreme, pregnant with ague and fevers. Although I rejoiced to
be on the free ocean, I yet could scarcely help feeling regret at
leaving, probably for ever, the noble stream on whose bosom I had so
long floated; on whose swelling and forest-shaded banks I had travelled
so far; whom I had seen in its infancy--if an infant it may ever be
considered--in its proud manhood, and now at the termination of its
mighty course.

These thoughts quickly vanished, however, as I felt the lively vessel
lift to the swelling wave, and smelt the salt pure breeze from off the
sea. Though the sea-breeze was very reviving after the hot pestilential
air of New Orleans, yet as it came directly in our teeth, our captain
wished it from some other quarter. We were enabled, however, to work
off the shore; and as during the night the land-breeze came pretty
strong, by day-break the next morning we were fairly at sea.

Before the sun had got up, the wind had gone down, and it soon became
what seamen call a flat calm. The sea, as the hot rays of the sun shone
on it, was, as it were, like molten lead; the sails flapped lazily
against the mast; the brig's sides, as she every now and then gave an
unwilling roll, threw off with a loud splash the bright drops of water
which they lapped up from the imperceptibly heaving bosom of the deep.
The hot sun struck down on our heads with terrific force, while the
pitch bubbled up out of the seams of the deck; and Bill Tasker, the wit
of the crew, declared he could hear it squeak into the bargain. An
awning was spread over the deck in some way to shelter us, or we should
have been roasted alive. Bill, to prove the excess of the heat, fried a
slice of salt junk on a piece of tin, and, peppering it well, declared
it was delicious. The only person who seemed not only not to suffer
from the heat, but to enjoy it, was the