Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/34

30 ces himself to me after tea. He wishes to ask me questions about the north. He feels her superiority, he says; but he wishes we better understood the difficulty of their position, who are born to the inheritance of slaves. He is one who voted for gradual emancipation; but the bill was lost. These are people of the old school of good breeding; and my talk with them is one of the pleasantest rays on the sand-bars of the Missouri.

A very faint idea of this fickle, deceitful Miss of the west can you form, without floating within her shores for a few days. There is no such thing as hurry, upon her waters. Put on steam, and set forth to drive a "fast team," and the circumstance which will make you white in the face, and faint at heart, will be the fangs of a "snag" driven into the keel; or the drifts of an unseen sand-bar on either side.

At table, I sit at the right hand of the Captain. The bell is rung the moment he appears at the farther end of the saloon, and every waiter watches the slightest motion of his hand, or eye. In his personal appearance, there is both dignity and authority; and at