A Son Of Mr. Short, A Landed Proprietor Who Holds Some Sixty Thousand Acres Of The Swamp Lands Of The Waccamaw, Escorted Me In His Yacht, With A Party Of Ladies And Gentlemen, Five Miles Across The Lake To My Point Of Departure.

It was now noon, and our little party picnicked under the lofty trees which rise from the low shores of Lake Waccamaw.

A little later we said our adieu, and the paper canoe shot into the whirling current which rushes out of the lake through a narrow aperture into a great and dismal swamp. Before leaving the party, Mr. Carroll had handed me a letter addressed to Mr. Hall, who was in charge of a turpentine distillery on my route. "It is twenty miles by the river to my friend Hall's," he said, "but in a straight line the place is just four miles from here." Such is the character of the Waccamaw, this most crooked of rivers.

I had never been on so rapid and continuous a current. As it whirled me along the narrow watercourse I was compelled to abandon my oars and use the paddle in order to have my face to the bow, as the abrupt turns of the stream seemed to wall me in on every side. 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.

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