Anxious to escape the officious kindness always encountered about the docks of southern cities, I peered about, hoping to find some quiet corner in which to moor my floating home.  Near the foot of Louisiana Avenue I saw the fine boat-house of the “Southern Boat Club,” and being pleasantly hailed by one of its members, hove to, and told him of my perplexity.  With the ever ready hospitality of a southerner, he assured me that the boat-house was at my disposal; and calling a friend to assist, we easily hauled the duck-boat out of the water, up the inclined plane, into her new quarters.

The row upon the Mississippi from its junction with the Ohio down to New Orleans, including many stoppages, had occupied nineteen days, and had been accelerated by considerable night voyaging.  The flow of the Mississippi was about one third faster than that of the Ohio.  Lloyd’s River Map gives the distance from the mouth of the Ohio to the centre of New Orleans as ten hundred and fifty-five miles, but the surveys of the United States Engineer Corps make this crooked route ten hundred and twenty miles only.

My floating home being now in good hands, its captain turned his back on the water, and took a turn on land, leaving the river bounded by its narrow horizon, but teeming with a strange, nomadic life, the various types of which afforded a field where much gleaning would end in but a scanty harvest of good.  Already my ears caught, in fancy, the sound of the restless waves of the briny waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and my spirits rose at the prospect of the broader experiences about to be encountered.

CHAPTER VIII.

NEW ORLEANS

Bienville and the city of the past.—­ French and Spanish rule in the new world.—­ Louisiana ceded to the united states.—­ Captain Eads and his jetties.—­ Transportation of cereals to Europe.—­ Charles Morgan.- - Creole types of citizens.—­ Levees and crawfish.—­ Drainage of the city into lake pontchartrain.

This was my fifth visit to New Orleans, and walking through its quaint streets I observed many changes of an undesirable nature, the inevitable consequences of political misrule.  As the past of the city loomed up before me, the various scenes of bloodshed, crime, and misery enacted, shifted like pictures in a panorama before my mind’s eye.  I saw far back in the distance an indomitable man, faint and discouraged, after the terrible sufferings of a winter at a bleak fort in the wilderness, drag his weary limbs to the spot where New Orleans now stands, and defiantly unfurling the flag of France, determined to establish the capital of Louisiana on the treacherous banks of the Mississippi.  Such was Bienville, the hardy son of a Canadian father.