STACK ISLAND. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence,Louisiana--which is the first distinctly Southern-looking townyou come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hungwith venerable gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive,Sunday aspect about the place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling--also with truth.

A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning thisregion which I would have hesitated to believe if I had notknown him to be a steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours,a resident of Arkansas City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat,a little Sunflower packet. He was an austere man, and hadthe reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man.

Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and keptback by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here.

One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing;but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the wayof discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property,it was quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wiseto be coughed down or sneered at. These mosquitoes had beenpersistently represented as being formidable and lawless;whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size,diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you wouldhave supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was softon the Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoesof Lake Providence to make up for it--'those Lake Providence colossi,'

as he finely called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog,and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come,they would kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it.

Referred in a sort of casual way--and yet significant way............