From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can’t ’get out of the river’ much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter.  The river is more than a mile wide, and very deep—­as much as two hundred feet, in places.  Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees.  The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles.  When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off their crops in a hurry.  When they have finished grinding the cane, they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call bagasse) into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills.  Now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan’s own kitchen.

An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a general thing.  Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel.  And see how you will feel, too!  You find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don’t.  The plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part of the sea.  All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty.  You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know.  All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore.  And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do.  One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week.  But there was no novelty about it; it had often been done before.