Southport Telegraph

NOTES FOR A TOURIST.

Madam,' said a free spoken, warm-hearted, enthusiastic, and a little quizzical son of old Kentucky, while paying his devoirs to one of the famous lady tourists of America, 'madam, go and see the falls of Niagara. May the Lord take a liking to you ma'am, if I didn't think I'd walk right up into futurity when I first seed that big slantendicular puddle! (Slantendicular's an alge-bra word ma'am, you may'nt know it.) Why, madam, I could tell you something about them falls--but you musn't put it into your book, 'cos nobody'll ever believe it. The people that live round about there all lose their speech and never hear each other speak for years, with the noise of the cataract! Fact ma'am, true as that's a pencil's and note-book you're taking out of your pocket. Why, there was a man lived there ten years, and he got so deaf he never knew a man was speaking to him till a pail of water was poured down the back of his neck! When you go to see the falls, ma'am, you must do all the talking you want before you get within twenty-five miles of them, for after that, not a word of any kind can be heard!'

'Then, madam, you should go and see the great cave in Kentucky, where the bats hibernaculate in countless millions. There is not such another hole in the ground to be found upon the face of the earth, or rather, under the earth. Madam, if you go back to England without seeing our mammoth cave you'll put your foot in it--no, beg pardon, excuse me--that's quite impossible--but you'll leave a pretty large hole in the book you're going to write. There is no end known to it, madam, and there is a salt lake in the middle of it twenty-five miles broad. One of the rooms is called the 'Antipodean Chamber,' from the unpronounceable fact that a man can just as easy walk upon the ceiling as upon the floor: and in this same apartment there is a natural fountain of pure brandy!

'You haint been South, yet have you, ma'am? you haint seen the Mississippi River and the city of New Orleans! Well, ma'am, New Orleans is a hundred and twenty-five miles below the level of the sea, and the Mississippi runs through a canal bridge right over the city! The inhabitants are chiefly alligators and screech-owls (which last word has been vulgarly perverted into Creole!) Their food is chiefly gum, procured from trees in the swamp which they call gumbo. Epicures have a way of making it exceedingly rich, by putting in fiddle strings made from vermin caught in cellars, and which is called vermicelli! There is a paper published there called the Picayune! the name being well chosen as significant of its professed piracies upon Kant's Philosophy, Baron Munchausen, the Pilgrim's Progress, Joe Miller, Washington Irving and Bell's Life in London. It is a violent and stupendous political print, and the government of the country has in vain endeavored to suppress it. One of the peculiar marks about this extraordinary city is the entire absence of those small quadrupeds of the genus mus, commonly known as rats! One was seen many years ago, by a citizen, who brutally murdered the unknown creature, but he was immediately tried, sentenced and hung for the enormity.

You will hear madam, a great deal about the 'floating population of New Orleans,' a phrase which you will understand, when I tell you that the town is one half the year under inundation from the Mississippi! You should have been born in America, my dear ma'am but as you were not, you may possibly die here, and that's some consolation for you!'

Our readers are informed that the work from which these notes were taken may be expected shortly from the English press.

N. O. Picayune.