“Buffalo fish is great on cotton, you know, Harris !"

The next morning, the bar was covered, also the snag, and Hank Harris was not to be seen. The Regulators visited his cabin; his family and "plunder" were gone. He would have undoubtedly been left to perish on the bar, but for his wife, who, notwithstanding his treatment of her, clung to him to the last. She went to him after dark, released him, took him home, cleansed and clothed him, and, packing up, they floated out of the Ohio and down the muddy Mississippi, and we never saw them again. Some six months aground on the

after, a steam-boat got

J

"Little Chain," about two miles above C- -a, and I took my little dug-out and paddled to her, to get some good cigars and hear the news from below. From the clerk I learned that a man answering Hank Harris's description had been killed in a fight with the blacklegs at "Natchez-underthe-Hill,"

XI.

A MODEST ESTIMATE OF OUR OWN
COUNTRY.

WHAT nation presents such a spectacle as ours, of a confederated government, so complicated, so full of checks and balances, over such a vast extent of territory, with so many varied interests, and yet moving so harmoniously! I go within the walls of the capitol at Washington, and there, under the starspangled banners that wave amid its domes, I find the representatives of three territories, and of twenty-four nations-nations in many senses they may be called-that have within them all the germ and sinew to raise a greater people than many of the proud principalities of Europe, all speaking one language—all acting with one heart, and all burning with the same enthusiasm-the love and glory of our common country,-even if parties do

exist, and bitter domestic quarrels now and then arise.

come.

I take my map, and I mark whence they What a breadth of latitude, and of longitude too,-in the fairest portion of North America! What a variety of climate, and then what a variety of production! What a stretch of sea-coast, on two oceans with harbours enough for all the commerce of the world! What an immense national domain, surveyed, and unsurveyed, of extinguished, and unextinguished Indian titles within the states and territories, and without, estimated, in the aggregate, to be 1,090,871,753 acres, and to be worth the immense sum of 1,363,589,69 dollars,750,000,000 acres of which are without the bounds of the states and the territories, and are yet to make new states and to be admitted into the Union! Our annual revenue, now, from the sales, is over three millions of dollars. Our national debt, too, is already more than extinguished, and yet within fifty-eight years, starting with a population of about three millions, we have fought the war of independence, again not ingloriously struggled with the greatest naval power in the world, fresh with laurels won on sea and land,—and now we have a population of over

thirteen millions of souls. One cannot feel the grandeur of our republic, unless he surveys it in detail. For example, a senator in congress, from Louisiana, has just arrived in Washington. Twenty days of his journey he passed in a steam-boat on inland waters,— moving not so rapidly, perhaps, as other steam-boats sometimes move, in deeper waters, -but constantly moving, at a quick pace too, day and night.

I never shall forget the rapture of a traveller, who left the green parks of New Orleans early in March,—that land of the orange and the olive, then teeming with verdure, freshness, and life, and, as it were, mocking him with the mid-summer of his own northern home. He journeyed leisurely towards the region of ice and snow, to watch the budding of the young flowers, and to catch the breeze of the spring. He crossed the Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne; he ascended the big Tombeckbee in a comfortable steam-boat. From Tuscaloosa, he shot athwart the wilds of Alabama, over Indian grounds, that bloody battles have rendered ever memorable. He traversed Georgia, the Carolinas, ranged along the base of the mountains of Virginia,-and for three months and more, he enjoyed one perpetual,

one unvarying, ever-coming spring,-that most delicious season of the year,-till, by the middle of June, he found himself in the fogs of the Passamaquoddy, where tardy summer was even then hesitating whether it was time to come. And yet he had not been off the soil of his own country! The flag that he saw on the summit of the fortress, on the lakes near New Orleans, was the like of that which floated from the staff on the hills of Fort Sullivan, in the easternmost extremity of Maine ;—and the morning gun that startled his slumbers, among the rocky battlements that defy the wild tides of the Bay of Fundy, was not answered till many minutes after, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The swamps, the embankments, the cane-brakes of the Father of Waters, on whose muddy banks the croaking alligator displayed his ponderous jaws, the cotton-fields, the ricegrounds of the low southern country,—and the vast fields of wheat and corn in the regions of the mountains, were far, far behind him and he was now in a Hyperborean land-where nature wore a rough and surly aspect, and a cold soil and a cold clime, drove man to launch his bark upon the ocean, to dare wind and wave, and to seek from the deep, in fisheries, and from freights, the