Page:A Physical and Topographical Sketch of the Mississippi Territory, Lower Louisiana, and a Part of West Florida.djvu/22

 even with the smallest cypress canoe; and many places that were once the aqueous apartments of the sportive trout, dressed with gaudy hangings of the nymphæa nelumbo, are now become the habitations of different kinds of forest trees, and so perfectly free from moisture, that the traveller finds himself little incommoded in passing these infant tracts of country.

Baton Rouge, the last place at which we see high land, in descending the Mississippi, must, I think, originally have been the confines of the Mexican Gulf; for, if here we preserve an east course, we pretty generally find the same appearance in the complexion of the earth and its productions, that are to be met with at the entrance of lake Ponchantrain into the gulf; and I am inclined to believe, that the Amité, which now disembogues into lake Maurepas, about fifty miles below its confluence with the Iber Ville Bayau, originally had its mouth somewhere about the place where it now meets the Iber Ville, and not more than ten miles from the Mississippi. Nothing can exceed the dreariness of the country through which the Amité passes after its junction with the Iber Ville, or Bayau Manchac. Obstructed from disgorging its contents into the Maurepas by the swellings of that lake, which are frequent, situated as it is, with only the intervention of lake Ponchantrain between it and the gulf. The land is so low, and extremely level, that the smallest swell in any of these lakes, is sufficient to cause the water of these small streams to regurgitate; and it frequently happens that the water of Amité is many weeks rising to a height great enough to force its way out into