TWO:Night had fully come. A few bivouac fires burned low in the grove, and at one of them near the grove gate I found our young commander. On a bench made of a fence-rail and two forked stakes he sat between Quinn and the first-lieutenant of the Louisianians. The doctor whom I had seen before sat humped on his horse, facing the three young men and making clumsy excuses to Ferry for leaving. The other physician would stay for some time yet, he said, and he, himself, was leaving his instruments, such as they were, and would return in the morning. "Fact is, my son's a surgeon, and he taken all my best instruments with him."During the whole of the voyage, as long as the daylight favored them, our young friends remained on deck, and studied the scenery along the route. Sometimes the sea widened out to fifty miles or more, and at others it contracted so that there was no sign of a passage before them, and it was difficult to say which way the steamer would turn. Now and[Pg 304] then the islands were so close together that the steamer made her course as though she were tracing the sinuosities of the Mississippi River, and it was necessary to keep a sharp lookout to avoid accidents on the numerous rocks that lie sunken in the channel. Mishaps to the steamers are of rare occurrence, as the channel has been carefully buoyed, and the pilots understand their business fully; but it is otherwise with the unwieldy junks, which are often driven by an adverse wind directly into the dangers their captains are seeking to avoid. The traffic through the Inland Sea is very great, both by the steamers and by the junks; and sometimes whole fleets of the latter may be seen waiting in some of the sheltering nooks for a favoring wind. The steamers make the passage from one end to the other of the Inland Sea in less than twenty-four hours; but the junks are frequently a fortnight in covering the same distance. They are never in a hurry, and therefore time is no object.
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