Now what COULD these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season! Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree.

This will serve to show how narrow some of the chutes were.

The passengers had an hour's recreation in a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend.
From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the river' much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter.

The river is more than a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places.
Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees.

The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles.