General Worth's Success In Quelling The Insurrection Of The Seminoles, Has Made Him Very Popular In Florida, Where The Energy And Sagacity With Which The Closing Campaign Of The War Was Conducted Are Spoken Of In The Highest Terms.

He has lately fixed his head-quarters at St Augustine.

In the afternoon, our steamer put in between two sandy points of land and we arrived at St Mary's, formerly a buccaneer settlement, but now so zealous for good order that our captain told us the inhabitants objected to his taking in wood for his steamboat on Sunday. The place is full of groves of the orange and lime - young trees which have grown up since 1835, and which, not having suffered, like those of St. Augustine, by the gale, I found beautifully luxuriant. In this place, it was my fate to experience the plague of sand-flies. Clouds of them came into the steamboat alighting on our faces and hands and stinging wherever they alighted. The little creatures got into our hair and into our eyes, and crawled up our sleeves and down our necks, giving us no rest, until late in the night the vessel left the wharf and stood out into the river, where the current of air swept most of our tormentors away.

The next morning, as we were threading the narrow channels by which the inland passage is made from St. Mary's to Savannah, we saw, from time to time, alligators basking on the banks. Some of our fellow-passengers took rifles and shot at them as we went by. The smaller ones were often killed, the larger generally took the rifle-balls upon their impenetrable backs, and walked, apparently unhurt, into the water. One of these monstrous creatures I saw receive his death-wound, having been fired at twice, the balls probably entering at the eyes. In his agony he dashed swiftly through the water for a little distance, and turning rushed with equal rapidity in the opposite direction, the strokes of his strong arms throwing half his length above the surface. The next moment he had turned over and lay lifeless, with his great claws upward. A sallow-complexioned man from Burke county, in Georgia, who spoke a kind of negro dialect, was one of the most active in this sport, and often said to the bystanders. "I hit the 'gator that time, I did." We passed where two of these huge reptiles were lying on the bank among the rank sedges, one of them with his head towards us. A rifle-ball from the steamer, struck the ground just before his face, and he immediately made for the water, dragging, with his awkward legs, a huge body of about fifteen feet in length. A shower of balls fell about him as he reached the river, but he paddled along with as little apparent concern as the steamboat we were in.

The tail of the alligator is said to be no bad eating, and the negroes are fond of it. I have heard, however, that the wife of a South Carolina cracker once declared her dislike of it in the following terms:

"Coon and collards is pretty good fixins, but 'gator and turnips I can't go, no how."

Collards, you will understand, are a kind of cabbage. In this country, you will often hear of long collards, a favorite dish of the planter.

Among the marksmen who were engaged in shooting alligators, were two or three expert chewers of the Indian weed - frank and careless spitters - who had never been disciplined by the fear of woman into any hypocritical concealment of their talent, or unmanly reserve in its exhibition. I perceived, from a remark which one of them let fall, that somehow they connected this accomplishment with high breeding. He was speaking of four negroes who were hanged in Georgia on a charge of murdering their owner.

"One of them," said he, "was innocent. They made no confession, but held up their heads, chawed their tobacco, and spit about like any gentlemen."

You have here the last of my letters from the south. Savannah, which I left wearing almost a wintry aspect, is now in the full verdure of summer. The locust-trees are in blossom; the water-oaks, which were shedding their winter foliage, are now thick with young and glossy leaves; the Pride of India is ready to burst into flower, and the gardens are full of roses in bloom.

Letter XVI.

An Excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire.

Addison County, Vermont, _July_ 10, 1843.

I do not recollect that I ever heard the canal connecting the Hudson with Lake Champlain praised for its beauty, yet it is actually beautiful - that part of it at least which lies between Dunham's Basin and the lake, a distance of twenty-one miles, for of the rest I can not speak. To form the canal, two or three streams have been diverted a little from their original course, and led along a certain level in the valley through which they flowed to pour themselves into Champlain. In order to keep this level, a perpetually winding course has been taken, never, even for a few rods, approaching a straight line. On one side is the path beaten by the feet of the horses who drag the boats, but the other is an irregular bank, covered sometimes with grass and sometimes with shrubs or trees, and sometimes steep with rocks. I was delighted, on my journey to this place, to exchange a seat in a stage-coach, driven over the sandy and dusty road north of Saratoga by a sulky and careless driver, for a station on the top of the canal-packet. The weather was the finest imaginable; the air that blew over the fields was sweet with the odor of clover blossoms, and of shrubs in flower. A canal, they say, is but a ditch; but this was as unlike a ditch as possible; it was rather a gentle stream, winding in the most apparently natural meanders.

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