itself, claret
is not better to drink than at New Orleans. It was all good--believe an
expert Robert--from the half-dollar Medoc of the public hotel table, to
the private gentleman's choicest wine. Claret is, somehow, good in that
gifted place at dinner, at supper, and at breakfast in the morning.
It is good: it is superabundant--and there is nothing to pay. Find
me speaking ill of such a country! When I do, pone me pigris campis:
smother me in a desert, or let Mississippi or Garonne drown me! At that
comfortable tavern on Pontchartrain we had a bouillabaisse than which a
better was never eaten at Marseilles: and not the least headache in the
morning, I give you my word; on the contrary, you only wake with a sweet
refreshing thirst for claret and water. They say there is fever there
in the autumn: but not in the spring-time, when the peach-blossoms blush
over the orchards, and the sweet herbs come to flavor the juleps.

I was bound from New Orleans to Saint Louis; and our walk was constantly
on the Levee, whence we could see a hundred of those huge white
Mississippi steamers at their moorings in the river: "Look," said my
friend Lochlomond to me, as we stood one day on the quay--"look at that
post! Look at that coffee-house behind it! Sir, last year a steamer blew
up in the river yonder, just where you see those men pulling off in the
boat. By that post where you are standing a mule was cut in two by a
fragment of the burst machinery, and a bit of the chimney-stove in that
first-floor window of the coffee-house, killed a negro who was cleaning
knives in the top-room!" I looked at the post, at the coffee-house
window, at the steamer in which I was going to embark, at my friend,
with a pleasing interest not divested of melancholy. Yesterday, it was
the mule, thinks I, who was cut in two: it may be cras mihi. Why, in the
same little sketch-book, there is a drawing of an Alabama river steamer
which blew up on the very next voyage after that in which your humble
servant was on board! Had I but waited another week, I might have. . . .
These incidents give a queer zest to the voyage down the life-stream
in America. When our huge, tall, white, pasteboard castle of a steamer
began to work up stream, every limb in her creaked, and groaned, and
quivered, so that you might fancy she would burst right off. Would she
hold together, or would she split into ten million of shivers? O my
home and children! Would your humble servant's bod