* This refers to an illustrated edition of the work.

** This was an account given by a gentleman at Richmond of his establishment.  Six European servants would have kept his house and stables well.  “His farm,” he said, “barely sufficed to maintain the negroes residing on it.”

How hospitable they were, those Southern men!  In the North itself the welcome was not kinder, as I, who have eaten Northern and Southern salt, can testify.  As for New Orleans, in spring-time,—­just when the orchards were flushing over with peach-blossoms, and the sweet herbs came to flavor the juleps—­it seemed to me the city of the world where you can eat and drink the most and suffer the least.  At Bordeaux 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,