little rivers of Europe, of some two or three hundred miles in length, compared to the Ohio.  There is nothing like it in all Europe for its great length, uninterrupted fertility, and varied resources, and consequent power to support an immense population.  Yet its banks consist not of a dead level, like the lower Nile and Volga, but of undulating plains and hills, which afford a lively flow to its waters, and supply an amount of hydraulic power which is amazing.  The river itself is composed of some of the prime streams of the country.  The Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Muskingum, the Miami, the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, are rivers of the most noble proportions, and the congregated mass of water rolls forward, increasing in volume and magnificence, until the scene delights the eye by its displays of quiet, lovely, rural magnitude and physical grandeur.

Yet all this is but an element in the vast system of western waters.  It reaches the Mississippi, but to be swallowed up and engulfed by that turbid and rapid stream, which, like some gaping, gigantic monster, running wild from the Rocky Mountains and the Itasca summit, stands ready to gulp it down.  The scene is truly magnificent, and the struggle not slight.  For more than twenty miles, the transparent blue waters of the Ohio are crowded along the Tennessee coast; but the Mississippi, swollen by its summer flood, as if disdainful of its rural and peace-like properties, gains the mastery before reaching Memphis, and carries its characteristic of turbid geologic power for a thousand miles more, until its final exit into the Mexican Gulf.

I had never seen such a sight.  I had lost all my standards of comparison.  Compared to it, my little home streams would not fill a pint cup; and, like a man suddenly ushered into a new world, I was amazed at the scene before me.  Mere amplitude of the most ordinary elements of water and alluvial land has done this.  The onward rush of eternal waters was an idea vaguely floating in my mind.  The Indians appeared to have embodied this idea in the word Mississippi.

Ensminger was a stout manly fellow, of the characteristic traits of Anglo-Saxon daring; but he thought it prudent not to plunge too hastily into this mad current, and we slept at the precise point of embouchure, where, I think, Cairo is now located.  Early the next morning the oarsmen were paraded, like so many militia, on the slatted gunwales of the barge, each armed with a long and stout setting pole, shod with iron.  Ensminger himself took the helm, and the toil and struggle of pushing the barge up stream began.  We were obliged to keep close to the shore, in order to find bottom for the poles, and whenever that gave out, the men instantly resorted to oars to gain some point on the opposite side, where bottom could be reached.  It was a struggle requiring the utmost activity.  The water was so turbid that we could not perceive objects an inch below the surface.  The current