Down The Tortuous, Black, Rolling Current Went The Paper Canoe, With A Giant Forest Covering The Great Swamp And Screening Me From The Light Of Day.

The swamps were submerged, and as the water poured out of the thickets into the river it would shoot across the land from one bend to another, presenting in places the mystifying spectacle of water running up stream, but not up an inclined plain.

Festoons of gray Spanish moss hung from the weird limbs of monster trees, giving a funeral aspect to the gloomy forest, while the owls hooted as though it were night. The creamy, wax-like berries of the mistletoe gave a Druidical aspect to the woods, for this parasite grew upon the branches of many trees.

One spot only of firm land rose from the water in sixteen miles of paddling from the lake, and passing it, I went flying on with the turbulent stream four miles further, to where rafts of logs blocked the river, and the sandy banks, covered with the upland forest of pines, encroached upon the lowlands. This was Old Dock, with its turpentine distillery smoking and sending out resinous vapors.

Young Mr. Hall read my letter and invited me to his temporary home, which, though roughly built of unplaned boards, possessed two comfortable rooms, and a large fireplace, in which light-wood, the terebinthine heart of the pine-tree, was cheerfully blazing.

I had made the twenty miles in three hours, but the credit of this quick time must be given to the rapid current. My host did not seem well pleased with the solitude imposed upon him. His employers had sent him from Wilmington, to hold and protect "their turpentine farm," which was a wilderness of trees covering four thousand acres, and was valued, with its distillery, at five thousand dollars. An old negro, who attended the still and cooked the meals, was his only companion.

We had finished our frugal repast, when a man, shouting in the darkness, approached the house on horseback. This individual, though very tipsy, represented Law and Order in that district, as I was informed when "Jim Gore," a justice of the peace, saluted me in a boisterous manner. Seating himself by the fire, he earnestly inquired for the bottle. His stomach, he said, was as dry as a lime-kiln, and, though water answers to slake lime, he demanded something stronger to slake the fire that burned within him. He was very suspicious of me when Hall told him of my canoe journey. After eying me from head to toe in as steady a manner as he was capable of, he broke forth with: "Now, stranger, this won't do. What are ye a-travel'ing in this sort of way for, in a paper dug-out?"

I pleaded a strong desire to study geography, but the wise fellow replied:

"Geography! geography! Why, the fellers who rite geography never travel; they stay at home and spin their yarns 'bout things they never sees." Then, glancing at his poor butternut coat and pantaloons, he felt my blue woollen suit, and continued, in a slow, husky voice: "Stranger, them clothes cost something; they be store-clothes.

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