WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sightat once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi.

The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. League after league, and still league after league,it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls,its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a movingobject of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotonyof the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes,and again the day--and still the same, night after nightand day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity,repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity,realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet,and longed for by the good and thoughtless!

Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to cometo America, from England; scattering ones at first, then a sortof procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding,patient march through the land during many, many years.

Each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind;but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors.

A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of itsaspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since thosestrangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then.

The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspectswere not all formed on one pattern, of course; they HADto be various, along at first, because the earlier touristswere obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in oldercountries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors.

And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things inthe world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier tomanufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall.

R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says--'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wishedto behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for allthe trouble I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking atthe river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything.

But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times,that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.'

Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months laterin the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi--'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearanceof this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters,and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never behelda scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi.

Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia fromits horrors. One only object rears itself above the eddying waters;this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to crossthe bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destructionthat has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.'

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