orange-groves," and "banana-overhung roads" by which I was to be enraptured in Louisiana, I utterly failed to discover then or subsequently. And this sail down the Lower Mississippi was, as I have described it, one bare, unbroken potato-field, with straggling shanties little larger or better than pig-styes. Here and there stood a villa, with an acre or 'two of garden-ground, in which the orange-trees might easily be counted.

As for the approach to New Orleans, it was less striking than that to any other city on the river-the idea conveyed by the name "Crescent City" being entirely a myth. You just run up a long quay, or rather succession of plank platforms, very sparsely lined by a single row of medium-sized ships, barques, and river steamers. The buildings facing it are painfully ugly, desolate-looking-cotton-presses, small irregular houses, and sheds which might, for aught else to be seen, represent a city of onetenth part of the size of New Orleans.

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VOL. II.

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CHAPTER XXXIII.

REPUBLICAN PIGS.

HAD always intended to give the pigs a special notice in this volume. The

subject has been again and more particularly brought before my mind by reminiscences of plantation-life, revived by recent consideration of the luxuries of that state of existence. Although such situations are favourable for the study of the habits of that much underrated animal, the pig, yet it is not only on the plantations and round the parlour-doors of the Southern planter that the pig is to be seen.. His motto in America is "Ubique."

On his arrival in America the traveller is met by a deputation of pigs-some apparently actuated by curiosity as to his personal appearance; some having their suspicions as to his luggage; and some receiving him with that delightful combination of noise and jostle, which forms one of the chief charms of American hospitality. At

every railway-station and steamboat-landing there is a select committee of pigs in attendance to present addresses and "make his stay agreeable." They do not, of course, offer the traveller refreshments, that not being the custom of the country, but they do the next best thing to it -namely, take refreshments if offered to them. So that, dead or alive, "hog" will not be out of the traveller's eyes, ears, nose, or mouth during the whole time that he stays in the country.

Let him go to the Rocky Mountains--there will be hog being devoured by a bear; or to the Atlantic and hog, in the course of a misunderstanding with a fellow-citizen having fallen over the wharf, will be drowning in the broad ocean. In the north he will be found frozen in the ice, with only his tail poking out; and in the extreme South he will be seen disappearing down the throat of an alligator. Pig, in all his varieties, is an institution of the country. A chibouk is not more inevitable in one's recollections of Turkey than is the "illigant curl" of a porker's tail in one's recollections of the United States.

Pig is the most numerous of the quadruped population of that favoured portion of the globe. He is acclimatized everywhere, and makes himself equally happy and contented, whether devouring, as I have seen him in Florida, a putrefying rattlesnake, or revelling in a burst bag of

corn on the banks of the Mississippi. Always alert, always self-reliant, and very seldom lowspirited, or "down upon his luck," the country and its free institutions seem so well adapted to his habits and to the development of his higher intellectual powers to say nothing of his sinews

-that it is difficult to decide whether he was made for the free institutions, or they for him. His importance is fully recognized in the public prints; and seeing what has already been done for the negro, I am hopeful that we shall, ere long, see the pig invested with the right of suffrage. It would not at all surprise me if I should be in America a year or two hence, to see a pig coming up the street with a black eye

and a revolver.

The pigs have their column in the daily newspapers; their arrival in the city is duly heralded, and their expectant friends duly informed whether they have travelled on foot, by rail, or by river. Their bodily health is made a matter of solicitude, and their mental condition is not neglected-for we are some times gratified by the announcement that pigs are lively; or pleasantly amused by being informed that pigs are "brisk;" and rendered anxious and unhappy by the intelligence that pigs are "dull." Sometimes a party of pigs may be seen in the full enjoyment of constitu

tional liberty (which is more than can be said for their Southern masters); and sometimes, of course, like other citizens, they are knocked on the head--the only difference being that, after death they are far more cared for, and are worth more money. The death of a member of the hog community is, however, seldom to be laid at the door (if he has one) of a fellow pig. Turbulent as may be their conduct sometimes, and fierce and noisy their outcries against an offender, yet the snout of the pig is seldom imbued with the blood of a brother-citizen. Such base crimes are confined to the so-called higher race of bipeds.

Strange to say, the vice of selfishness has become synonymous with the habits of the hog race. "Piggish" has become a by-word; but my own observation enables me to assert that this is a base calumny. Among no class of beings is selfishness regarded with more horror; and the pig who should be shameless enough, and daring enough, to run off with a whole ear of corn, would soon become aware, from the indignant outcries of the bystanders, and by having it violently taken from him, that such rapacity could not be permitted, and that the sense of the pig community was decidedly against it. Among the more hot-blooded of the fraternity differences will be settled by an appeal to-not arms, but legs-for of course, in so thinly-settled