Fancy my distress one evening, when, on opening my cabin-door, I beheld a fellow-creature doubled up at the entry of the door opposite.  I thought the poor sufferer had a fit of cholera, and I was expecting each instant to hear his screams; but hearing nothing, I examined the person in question more minutely.  It was merely a gentleman, who had dispossessed himself of his jacket, waistcoat, trousers, and boots, not forgetting his stockings; and then deliberately planting his chair in the open entry of the door, and gathering up one foot on the seat thereof, was amusing himself by cutting and picking the horny excrescences of his pedal digits, for the benefit of the passengers in the gentlemen’s saloon; and, unfortunately, you could not be sure that his hands would be washed before he sat next to you at breakfast in the morning,—­for I can testify that I have, over and over again, sat next to people, on these Western waters, whose hands were scarce fit to take coals out of a scuttle.

There is nothing I have here set down but what actually passed under my own eye.  You will, of course, find gentlemen on board, and many whose manners there is nothing to complain of, and whose conversation is both instructive and amusing; but you evidently are liable to find others to realize the picture I have given of scenes in the gentlemen’s saloon, and, unless you have some acquaintance among the ladies, their saloon is as sacred from a gentleman as the Sultan’s harem.  And whence comes all this, except from that famous bugbear “equality?” Is there any real gentleman throughout the Empire State who would, in his heart, approve of this ridiculous hustling together of well-bred and ill-bred?  But it pleases the masses, and they must submit to this incongruous herding and feeding, like the hungry dogs of a “Dotheboys Hall” kennel.

It may be useful information for the traveller, and is only fair to the Mississippi boat proprietors, to observe, that if you succeed in getting a passage in a perfectly new boat, there is always more care, more safety, better living, and better company.  In all the boats there is one brush and comb for the use of the passengers.

By the aid of steam and stream, we at last reached Cairo, which is on the southern bank of the Ohio and the eastern of the Mississippi; its advantageous position has not passed unnoticed, but much money has been thrown away upon it, owing to the company’s not sitting down and counting the cost before they began.  There can be no question that, geographically, it is par excellence the site for the largest inland town of America, situated as it is at the confluence of the two giant arteries; and not merely is its position so excellent but mountains of coal are in its neighbourhood.  The difficulty which has to be contended against is the inundation of these rivers.  Former speculators built up levees; but either from want of pluck or purse, they were inefficiently constructed; the Mississippi