Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/448

Rh covered with the now leafless woods of a kind of poplar called cotton-wood. It is horribly monotonous. The weather is grey and cold, and everything looks grey around us. We have now Missouri on our right and Kentucky on our left. I am sorry not to have had time to see more of Kentucky and her people. They are peculiar in appearance and in disposition. They are tall and very limber in their joints, and are a dexterous, generous, freespoken, good-natured, cordial, droll people, whom I should have become very fond of. And then, “Skyrnir's Glove,” the mammoth cave, and the little green river which flows there.—I ought to have seen them! Lerner H. talks about that cave till I almost fancy I have seen it.

I must tell you of a pleasure which he prepared for me one evening on the Ohio. He asked me whether I should like to hear the negroes of the ship sing, and led me for this purpose to the lowest deck, where I beheld a strange scene. The immense engine-fires are all on this deck, eight or nine apertures all in a row; they are like yawning fiery throats, and beside each throat stood a negro naked to his middle, who flung in fire-wood. Pieces of wood were passed onwards to these feeders by other negroes, who stood up aloft on a large open place between them and yet another negro, who standing on a lofty stack of firewood, threw down with vigorous arms food for the monsters on deck. Lerner H. encouraged the negroes to sing; and the negro up aloft on the pile of fire-wood began immediately an improvised song in stanzas, and at the close of each, the negroes down below joined in vigorous chorus. It was a fantastic and grand sight to see these energetic, black athletes lit up by the wildly flashing flames from the fiery throats, whilst, amid their equally fantastic song, they kept time most exquisitely, and hurled one piece of firewood after another into the yawning, fiery gulf. Everything went on with so much life, and so methodically, and