shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind the street's whole length.
The candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility proud and ancient along
the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated merely the humble
barbershop along the main street of Dawson's Landing. On a chief corner
stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to bottom with tin pots
and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy notice to the world (when
the wind blew) that his shop was on hand for business at that corner.

The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river; its
body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline; its most rearward
border fringed itself out and scattered its houses about its base line of
the hills; the hills rose high, enclosing the town in a half-moon curve,
clothed with forests from foot to summit.

Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to the
little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big
Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight;
and this was the case also with the great flotilla of "transients."
These latter came out of a dozen rivers--the Illinois, the Missouri, the
Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red
River, the White River, and so on--and were bound every whither and
stocked with every imaginable comfort or necessity, which the
Mississippi's communities could want, from the frosty Falls of St.
Anthony down through nine climates to torrid New Orleans.

Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked grain
and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and comfortable and
contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly--very slowly,
in fact, but still it was growing.