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air is soft and balmy. How pleasant to have the warm Southern breezes kissing your cheeks, while your friends at home are shivering in the cold November winds.

We passed the "graves," and left the Alleghany stranded on one of them. We had been playing "hide and seek" with her among the islands, bends and curves in the river, all the way from St. Louis. But now we have left her, poor thing! in distress. She remained there, stranded, for nearly twenty-four hours. We got to Cairo by sunset, and there laid by all night.

This morning it is truly in the "fogs" of Egypt. This town has a criminal reputation. The inhabitants are called "Thugs," and travelers tell hard stories about their "robbing," and now and then a man's "being heard of no more," after he had sought their hospitality.

From the limestone bluffs, at Alton, commences what is called the American bottoms, and continues to the mouth of the Ohio. The people here call this bottom, or lower part of Illinois, Egypt, from its near resemblance to ancient Egypt. It is a great country for corn; its capital, or principal town, is Cairo; and in point of intelligence, the darkness of Egypt covers the land.

We left the Alleghany here. We have got the "tag" now, and we will keep it unless the sand-bars hold us as they did her yesterday, and she gets it as we did, and runs away.

But we are leaving the limestone bluffs of Missouri. The last stone bluffs are seen in descending about thirty miles above the mouth of the Ohio, and below the mouth of the river, the alluvion, the river flats, broadens from thirty to forty miles in width, still expanding to the Balize, where it is three times that width. And three-fifths of this alluvion is either dead swamps of cypress forest, or stagnant

lakes, or creeping bayous, or impenetrable cane-brakes, a great part of it inundated.

From St. Louis to the mouth of the Ohio, on the West side of the river, the bluffs are generally near it, seldom diverging from it more than two miles. These are mostly perpendicular masses of limestone, sometimes shooting up into towers and pinnacles, presenting, as JEFFERSON observes, at a distance, the appearance of the battlements and towers of an ancient city.

At the Cornice rocks, and the cliffs above St. Genevieve, they rise between two and three hundred feet above the level of the river. They are imposing spectacles in the distance. We might mention among them that gigantic mass of rocks, forming a singular island in the river, called the "Grand Tower," and the shot towers of Herculaneum. Two striking peculiarities of this river are often unobserved.

First, no person who descends it receives on his first trip a clear and adequate idea of its grandeur, and the amount of water that it carries. When he sees it descending from the Falls of St. Anthony, that it swallows up one river after another, with mouths as wide as itself, without affecting its width at all; when he sees it receiving in succession the mighty Missouri, which changes the color of the waters, making them muddy

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the broad Ohio, St. Francis, Arkansas and Red, all of them of great depth, length and volume of water-absorbing them all, and retaining a volume apparently unchanged, and, strange to relate, even growing narrower ;

when he sees all this he begins to estimate the force, fury, overwhelming power and increasing depth of the current as it sweeps and rolls on to the great Gulf.

The other peculiarity is the uniformity of its "meanders"-the points and bends in its course. One would think that the deep and frequent draughts it had taken— an accumulating force with no increasing width-that this would cause it irregularly to sway from side to side, like a drunken POLYPHEMUS. But what is most remarkable, there is "method in this madness." The curves are often described as with the decision of a compass. Having performed this sweep, or half-circle, the current is precipitated across its own channel, and describes another curve of the same regularity on the opposite shore. Thus the great "Father-of waters" goes on in a grand waltz to the ocean. The curves are so regular, that boatmen and Indians formerly calculated distances by them, instead of estimating their progress by the mile or league.

Here on

Opposite these bends there is always a sand-bar, matched in its convexity to the concavity of the curve. this bar you see those young cotton-wood groves in their most striking appearance. The trees rising from the shore, showing the present year's growth, while those of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on, recede and rise higher in regular gradations, with foliage varying in hues from the pale to the deep and deeper green, till they gain the ancient wood.

"Tis a scene that would delight a Shenstone."

Then in the middle of the stream you often find beautiful islands. One would think them the charming haunts of river nymphs, they have such an aspect of beauty as they appear at a distance swelling from the stream, clothed

in their woody grandeur; and when sunset gilds them they look

"Like emeralds chased in gold."

As we sailed out from among these "fairy isles" we often came suddenly in sight of the "silvery sand-bars,” the resort of innumerable geese, cranes, pelicans and waterfowl.

GELINE.

The whole river scene I have described is most poetically and truthfully delineated by LONGFELLOW in his EVANIn fact, it is one of the fine poetical descriptions of a scene which one rarely finds, that it will do to read on the spot:

"Day after day they glided down the turbulent river;
Now through rushing chutes, among green islands, where

plum-like

Cotton-trees nodded their shadowy crests, they swept with
the current,

Then emerged into broad lagoons, where silvery sand-bars
Lay in the stream, and along the wimpling waves of the

margin,

Shining with snow-white plumes large flocks of pelicans

waded."

But there goes the "gong!" I must leave the contemplation of this broad and magnificent river, winding on toward the tropics amid landscape scenes so delightful for the eye to roam over, and hasten down to dinner.

It is like sitting down to a banquet to take seat at one of these tables. One wants the faculty of Sir WALTER SCOTT in describing a feast, to give an idea of the repasts on board one of these steamers.

Some rich soup leads-but let our Marseillese describe them:

"You have grand table on the Mississippi steamersgrand table-better than I get at the Astor House or St. Charles, New Orleans; grand table. I travel up and down this river quite often, for the good living you get on these steamboat. But you have miserable poor brandy and wine; miserable poor. It makes one feel bad, very bad, to get drunk in America; but mighty pleasont in France; mighty pleasont.'

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A Mississippi steamer is a miniature world afloat, or as our Kentuckian expresses it, "Should the world be deluged again, it would only be necessary, by way of preserving the human family, to save one of these Mississippi steamers as a ‘nest-ark,' which generally contains, not only the animal kingdom represented in 'pairs' but the human family by nations."

One not only finds its passengers of a many-placed variety, but the various parts that men "act" in life you find here represented, the serious, gay and comic.

B., our Kentuckian, is a true son of COMUS. He does our song-singing, fluting, violining and story-telling. He is a medley. His entertainment this evening began with some piece of spirit and sentiment, or a hymn. Then, "OLD UNCLE NED," followed by some boatman's song.

After this came in passages from HAMLET or RICHARD III. He is endeavoring to draw the auditors from our "Actress," who is entertaining the other end of the cabin with singing and music from the piano.

We have, of course, among the variety, the "suspicious character," and they appear to be among those that are so much attached to the card-table. Several of them seem to express the gambler in his genuine character. Though our New York city merchant tells me they have not the real gambler aboard; still the wine and brandy they in

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