As soon as I returned to Potosi, I packed my collection of mineralogy, &c.  I ordered the boxes by the lead teams to St. Genevieve.  I went to the same point myself, and, taking passage in the new steamer “St. Louis,” descended the Mississippi to New Orleans.  The trip occupied some days.  I repassed the junction of the Ohio with deep interest.  It is not only the importance of geographical events that impresses us.  The nature of the phenomena is often of the highest moral moment.

An interesting incident occurred as soon as I got on board the steamer.  The captain handed me a letter.  I opened it, and found it to contain money from the secretary of a secret society.  I was surprised at such an occurrence, but I confess not displeased.  I had kept my pecuniary affairs to myself.  My wardrobe and baggage were such as everywhere to make a respectable appearance.  If I economized in travel and outlay, I possessed the dignity of keeping my own secret.  One night, as I lay sleepless in a dark but double-bedded room, an old gentleman—­a disbanded officer, I think, whose health disturbed his repose—­began a conversation of a peculiar kind, and asked me whether I was not a Freemason.  Darkness, and the distance I was from him, induced a studiedly cautious reply.  But a denouement the next day followed.  This incident was the only explanation the unwonted and wholly unexpected remittance admitted.  A stranger, traveling to a southern and sickly city to embark for a distant State, perhaps never to return—­the act appeared to me one of pure benevolence, and it reveals a trait which should wipe away many an error of judgment or feeling.

The voyage down this stream was an exciting one, and replete with novel scenes and incidents.  The portion of the river above the mouth of the Ohio, which it had taken me twenty days to ascend in a barge, we were not forty-eight hours in descending.  Trees, points of land, islands, every physical object on shore, we rushed by with a velocity that left but vague and indistinct impressions.  We seemed floating, as it were, on the waters of chaos, where mud, trees, boats, were carried along swiftly by the current, without any additional impulse of a steam-engine, puffing itself off at every stroke of the piston.  The whole voyage to New Orleans had some analogy to the recollection of a gay dream, in which objects were recollected as a long line of loosely-connected panoramic fragments.

At New Orleans, where I remained several days, I took passage in the brig Arethusa, Captain H. Leslie, for New York.

While at anchor at the Balize, we were one night under apprehensions from pirates, but the night passed away without any attack.  The mud and alluvial drift of the Mississippi extend many leagues into the gulf.  It was evident that the whole delta had been formed by the deposits made in the course of ages.  Buried trees, and other forms of organic life, which have been disinterred from the banks of the river, as high,