He Told Me That The Boundary-Line Between North And South Carolina Crossed This Swamp Three And A Half Miles Below Piraway Ferry, And That The First Town On The River Waccamaw, In South Carolina, Conwayborough, Was A Distance Of Ninety Miles By River And Only Thirty Miles By Land.

There was but one bridge over the river, from its head to Conwayborough, and it was built by Mr. James Wortham, twenty years before, for his plantation.

This bridge was twenty miles below Piraway, and from it by land to a settlement on Little River, which empties into the Atlantic, was a distance of only five miles. A short canal would connect this river and its lumber regions with Little River and the sea.

For the first time in my experience as a traveller I had entered a country where the miles were short. When fifteen years old I made my first journey alone and on foot from the vicinity of Boston to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This boyish pedestrian trip occupied about twenty-one days, and covered some three hundred miles of hard tramping. New England gives honest measure on the finger-posts along her highways. The traveller learns by well-earned experience the length of her miles; but in the wilderness of the south there is no standard of five thousand two hundred and eighty feet to a statute mile, and the watermen along the sea-coast are ignorant of the fact that one-sixtieth of a degree of latitude (about six thousand and eighty feet) is the geographical and nautical mile of the cartographer, as well as the "knot" of the sailor.

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