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Nothing can be added to his pictures of quiet farm-life in Acadie, the Indian summer of our northern latitudes, the scenery of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the bayous and cypress forests of the South, the mocking-bird, the prairie, the Ozark hills, the Catholic missions, and the wild Arabs of the West, roaming with the buffalo along the banks of the Nebraska.
The first of these is often taken in summer in the lakes and bayous, which, deprived of water for a season, are transformed into pastures; these lakes, however, have always a channel or deeper part, and there the devil jack diamond has been caught, weighing four hundred pounds and upwards.
They have always asserted their rights to the lowlands in which they live, and have under the most trying circumstances braved inundation. They have built more than one thousand five hundred miles of levees within the state limits. The state engineer corps is always at work along the banks of the Mississippi and its important bayous.
Some miles from New Carthage the levee to Bayou Vidal was broken in several places, overflowing the roads for the distance of two miles. Boats were collected from the surrounding bayous, and some constructed on the spot from such material as could be collected, to transport the troops across the overflowed interval.
By taking a diagonal line through the woods, the chances were ten to one we should lose our way, and perhaps not find a proper place of concealment. The chances were, too, that we might not find a path, through the network of swamps and bayous that traversed the forest in every direction.
And none of Feliu's boats had yet come in; doubtless they had been driven into some far-away bayous by the storm. The only boat at the settlement, the Carmencita, had been almost wrecked by running upon a snag three days before; there was at least a fortnight's work for the ship-carpenter of Dead Cypress Point.
These streams, or "bayous," are narrow and tortuous, but generally deep, and navigable for ordinary steamboats. The "Atchafalaya" is the first, and enters the Gulf of Mexico at the bay of the same name. At one time it was feared the Mississippi might leave its present bed, and follow the course of this bayou. Steps were taken to prevent such an occurrence.
On the western side lies a host of smaller islands, the passes between them made by the bayous which straggle down through the land. Northward the bay stretches sixteen miles inland, and then breaks up into a medley of bayous and small lakes, cutting far into the land, and yielding an easy passage to the level of the Mississippi, opposite New Orleans.
It was not an island until you, stout Jean Lafitte, ordered the Yankee Morrison to take a hundred black slaves with spades and cut a channel across the neck, so that you could get through more quickly from the Spanish Main to the hidden bayous where your boats lay concealed until the wagons from Iberia could come and traffic at the causeway for your wares. Do you not remember it well?"
Forty years ago, there was quite an excitement among the cotton-planters, in the neighborhood of Natchez, upon the subject of sugar-planting in the southern portion of Louisiana. The section of country attracting the largest share of attention for this purpose was the Teche, or Attakapas country, the Bayous La Fourche, Terre Bonne, and Black.
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