headlands indenting the Ohio with promontories like a chain of shining lakes. Hills clothed in ancient timber, hoary whitened sycamores draped in green clusters of mistletoe, and magnificent groves of the dark green sugar tree reflected from the water below. Shut in to the water's edge, a woody wilderness still, the river glided between its umbrageous shores.
Now and then the crowing of cocks announced a clearing where the axe of the settler had made headway, or some old Indian mound blossomed with a peach orchard. Flocks of screaming paroquets alighted in the treetops, humming birds whizzed into the honeysuckle vines and flashed away with dewdrops on their jewelled throats.
On the water with them, now near, now far, were other boats,—ferry flats and Alleghany skiffs, pirogues hollowed from prodigious sycamores, dug-outs and canoes, stately barges with masts and sails and lifted decks like schooners, keel boats, slim and trim for low waters, Kentucky arks, broadhorns, roomy and comfortable, filled up with chairs, beds, stoves, tables, bound for the Sangamon, Cape Girardeau, Arkansas.
Floating caravans of men, women, children, servants, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, and fowl were travelling down the great river. Some boats fitted up for stores dropped off at the settlements, blowing the bugle, calling the inhabitants down to trade.
Here a tinner with his tinshop, with tools and iron, a floating factory, there a blacksmith shop with bellows and anvil, dry-goods boats with shelves for cutlery and cottons, produce boats with Kentucky flour and hemp, Ohio apples, cider, maple sugar, nuts, cheese, and fruit, and farther down, Tennessee cotton, Illinois corn, and cattle, Missouri lead and furs, all bound for New Orleans, a panorama of endless interest to Julia. Here white-winged schooners were laden entirely with turkeys, tobacco, hogs, horses, potatoes, or lumber. Nature pouring forth perennial produce from a hundred tributary streams.
A bateau could descend from the mouth of the Ohio to New Orleans in three weeks; three months of t
