"

And this was the case, as they thought, with the other poor fellow, who
was not found for weeks, it having been conjectured that he had fallen
down a hole. One of the guides making some new exploration, discovered
him sitting down, no sign of decomposition having taken place, and no
sign of his having died of starvation, for a piece of biscuit was found
in his pocket. He was supposed to have died of terror, the terrible
darkness working upon the nervous system, and the hopelessness of
penetrating it making the minutes appear hours. A guide who had once
been lost there himself for some twenty hours, said he never could
believe he had not been there for several days.

DOWN THE OHIO AND MISSISSIPPI.

THOMAS L. NICHOLS.

["Forty Years of American Life," by Dr. Thomas L. Nichols, is
the source of the following selection, which gives a graphic
and interesting picture of steamboat life on the great rivers
of the West in the days before the war. It needs only one thing
to complete the story, the race and the explosion, which was
no uncommon incident at that period, but an example of which,
fortunately for our author, was not among his experiences.]

We embarked on a little steamboat which drew twelve inches of water, and
whose single wide paddle-wheel was at the stern, and extended the whole
width of the hull. A succession of dams made the river navigable at that
season of low water, and at each dam we were let down by a lock to a
lower level. At the high stage of water dams and locks are all buried
deep beneath the surface, and larger steamboats go careering over them.

What I best remember, in crossing the Alleghanies and descending this
river, were the beds of coal. It seemed to be everywhere just below the
surface. We saw it along the route, where the people dug the fuel for
their fires out of a hole in the yard, ten feet from the door. Along the
high perpendicular banks of the river there were strata of coal ten or
twelve feet thick. Men were digging it down with picks and sliding it
into flat-boats, which, when the river rose, would float down with the
current to Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans. These frail
boats--long boxes made of deal boards nailed together, and loaded
nearly to the top--would many of them be lost. The swell of a passing
steamboat, or a snag or a sawyer in the river, would sink them. They
would ground on sand-bars. A sudden hurricane