It discharges,
however, three times as much water as the Danube, twenty-five times as
much as the Rhine, and almost three hundred and fifty times as much as
the Thames. It has several hundred navigable tributaries, and its
navigable waters, stretched in a straight line, would reach nearly
three-fourths the distance around the earth. It is one of the most
sinuous of rivers. In one part of its course it flows in a channel
nearly 1,400 miles long to accomplish, as the crow flies, the distance
of 700 miles. In more than one place the current forms a loop ten,
twenty and even thirty miles around, rather than to cut through a neck
perhaps not half a mile in width. It is one of the most capricious of
rivers, for its channel rarely lies in the same place during two
successive seasons. The river manifests a strong inclination to move
east; and were La Salle to repeat his memorable voyage, he would touch
in scarcely half a score of places the course he formerly traveled; or
if he were to go over exactly the same course, he must of necessity
have his boats dragged over the ground, for almost the entire course
over which he traveled is now dry land. Since that time the river has
deserted almost all of its former channel, as if to repudiate its
connection with the after-dinner treaties of two hundred years lang
syne; in places its channel lies to the west, but for the greater
extent it is to the eastward.
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