against the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But
the miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf
never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river,
slips into some canal-mouth, labors along the artificial channel
awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free
way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps
thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of
drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at
long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating
machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes be pursued,
you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre
mazes of swamp-forest,--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary
with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of
fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides
again into canal or bayou,--from bayou or canal once more into
lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away
from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of
breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like
thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of
reptile voices chanting in cadence,--rhythmically surging in
stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,--a monstrous and appalling
chorus of frogs! ....

Panting, screaming, scraping her bottom over the sand-bars,--all
day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue
open water below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be
fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset. For
the sake of passengers, she travels by day only; but there are
other vessels which make the journey also by night--threading the
bayou-labyrinths winter and summer: sometimes steering by the