Evening comes. The lazy waves now nearly reach the window-sills upon the lower floors. The cattle left behind low uneasily as they move about in water knee-deep. No one is near to feed them, and the udders of the cows are swollen with milk. Here and there a mule is seen, stamping impatiently and braying mournfully for lack of feed. The water displays a decided but wayward current, swirling now this way, now that. All the land is covered. Here and there numerous snakes have crawled into the bushes to escape the yellow flood. Out in a lowland tract a deserted shanty bobs idly along, now grounding a moment, now floating lazily around a great tree, finally becoming an item of the great mass of drift that has lodged at the edge of the forest, and swarms with small animals flying from the clutch of the crawling water. The game of the canebrakes and swamp regions has fled to the uplands, and from time to time some needy refugee family, heedless of game laws, adds venison to its scanty store.
The night wears away. The negro cabins are deserted: most have floated away with the growing current. The simple folk have abandoned them. Some have made their way to the levees, hoping for a passing steamer. Others, dwelling above the crevasse, have little to fear from currents; and as the water rises around them, they take to hastily constructed rafts, transferring their few household effects thereto, and dwelling for days in a floating camp, sheltered from the rain by a wagon-sheet or old quilts stretched over a low ridge-pole. Mooring the rafts to trees, they lead, to others a romantic, to themselves a precarious existence.
NOT SO ROMANTIC AS IT LOOKS.
A whole village deserted by its people wears a singularly melancholy aspect. Let the reader row with a press correspondent through the little town of Bayou Sara La, as it appeared during the recent overflow. The town lies on rolling ground, dotted here and there with low hills or drifts of sand and alluvial deposits, left thereby the floods of ages ago.
“Even over the center of the roadway back from the front street, which is just behind the levee, it is unusual to find less than four feet of water, while in many places a nine-foot oar can not be made to touch bottom. In some of what, in times of low water, are beautiful residence streets, the boat as it went gliding on the shining moonlight flood would pass so close under the spreading branches of the great live oaks, which interlock their boughs over the roadway, that her occupants would be compelled to bend down almost level with the gunwales to avoid being swept off the thwarts. The freaks of the currents wandering through the flooded streets seem wholly unaccountable. Sometimes they would run parallel with, and at others directly at right angles to the streets. Often progress would be blocked by long sections of wooden-plank sidewalks, gates, doors and cisterns that had formed barriers across the street, while at every turning the boatman would be compelled to dodge huge floating masses of drift in which out-houses, timbers, sections of roofs and other heavy wreckage inextricably commingling were slowly floating on the lazy current.