carry their loads of grain to the river for loading the steamers.

MOBILE, ALA., Saturday, May 11, 1861.

The wayfarer who confides in the maps of a strange country, or who should rely upon even the guide-books of the United States, which still lack a Murray or a Bradshaw, may be at times embarrassed by insuperable hills and innavigable rivers. When, however, I saw the three towering stories of the high-pressure steamer Southern Republic, on board of which we tumbled down the steep bank of the Alabama river at Montgomery, any such misgivings vanished from my mind. So colossal an ark could have ascended no mythical stream, and the existence and capabilities of the Alabama were demonstrated by its presence.

Punctuality is reputed a rare virtue in the river steamers of the West and South, and seldom leave their wharves until they have bagged a fair complement of passengers, although steaming up and ringing gongs and bells every afternoon for a week or more before their departure, as if travelers were to be swarmed like bees. Whether stimulated by the infectious activity of these “war times,” or convinced that the “politeness of kings” is the best steamboat policy, the grandson of Erin who owns and commands the Southern Republic, casts off his fastenings but half an hour after his promised start, and the short puff of the engine is enlivened by the wild strains of a steam-organ called a “caliope,” which gladdens us with the assurance that we are in the incomparable “land of Dixie.”

Reserving for a cooler hour the attractions of the lower floor, a Hades consecrated to machinery, freight and negroes, we betake ourselves to the second landing, where we find a long dining hall, surrounded by two tiers of state-rooms, the upper one accessible by a stair-way leading to a gallery, which divides the “saloon” between floor and roof. We are shown our quarters, which leave much to be desired and nothing to spare, and rush from their suffocating atmosphere to the outer balcony, where a faint breeze stirs the air. There is a roofed balcony above us that corresponds to the second tier of state-rooms, from which a party of excited secessionists are discharging revolvers at the dippers on the surface, and the cranes on the banks of the river.

After we have dropped down five or six miles from Montgomery, the steam-whistle announces our approach to a landing, and, as there is no wharf in view, we watch curiously the process by which our top-heavy craft, under the sway of a four-knot current, is to swing round to her invisible moorings. As we draw nigh to a wagon-worn indenture in the bank, the “scream” softens into the dulcet pipes of the “caliope,” and the steamer doubles upon her track, like an elephant turning at bay, her two engines being as independent of each other as seceding states, and slowly stemming the stream, lays her nose upon the bank, and holds it there with the judicious aid of her paddles until a long plank is run ashore from her bow, over which three passengers with valises make way for a planter and his family, who come on board. The gang plank is hauled in, the steamer turns her head down stream with the expertness of a whale in a canal, and we resume our voyage. We renew these stoppages various times before dark, landing here a barrel and there a box, and occasionally picking up a passenger.