Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/241

 THE POST-OFFICE

I

little steamer will bear you thither in one summer day,—starting at early morning, arriving just as the sun begins to rest his red chin upon the edge of the west. It is a somewhat wearisome and a wonderfully tortuous journey, through that same marshy labyrinth by which the slavers in other days used to smuggle their African freight up to the old Creole city from the Gulf. . . . Leaving the Mississippi by a lock-guarded opening in its western levee, the miniature packet first enters a long and narrow canal,—cutting straight across plantations considerably below the level of its raised banks,—and through this artificial waterway she struggles on, panting desperately under the scorching heat, until after long hours she almost leaps, with a great steam-sigh of relief, into the deeper and broader bayou that serpentines through the