the great event of the week. There are no telegraph lines, no
telephones: the mail-packet is the only trustworthy medium of
communication with the outer world, bringing friends, news,
letters. The magic of steam has placed New Orleans nearer to New
York than to the Timbaliers, nearer to Washington than to Wine
Island, nearer to Chicago than to Barataria Bay. And even during
the deepest sleep of waves and winds there will come betimes to
sojourners in this unfamiliar archipelago a feeling of
lonesomeness that is a fear, a feeling of isolation from the
world of men,--totally unlike that sense of solitude which haunts
one in the silence of mountain-heights, or amid the eternal
tumult of lofty granitic coasts: a sense of helpless insecurity.

The land seems but an undulation of the sea-bed: its highest
ridges do not rise more than the height of a man above the
salines on either side;--the salines themselves lie almost level
with the level of the flood-tides;--the tides are variable,
treacherous, mysterious. But when all around and above these
ever-changing shores the twin vastnesses of heaven and sea begin
to utter the tremendous revelation of themselves as infinite
forces in contention, then indeed this sense of separation from
humanity appalls ... Perhaps it was such a feeling which forced
men, on the tenth day of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six,
to hope against hope for the coming of the Star, and to strain
their eyes towards far-off Terrebonne. "It was a wind you could
lie down on," said my friend the pilot.

... "Great God!" shrieked a voice above the shouting of the
storm,--"she is coming!" ... It was true. Down the Atchafalaya,
and thence through strange mazes of bayou, lakelet, and pass, by