CUCKOO NOTES. 135 
and many another of the shyest and rarest of 
our birds. 
Nearly all the rivers and rivulets of North 
Georgia are bordered with canebrakes and 
overhanging trees, darkly cumbered and bowed 
with the wildest masses of muscadine vines. 
The canoe-voyager passing down the Oostanau- 
la, the Connasauga, the Coosawattee or the 
Salliquoy—streams as free and unconventional 
as the savages who gave them their musical 
names—will have exceptional opportunities 
for studying nature at first hand. 
It was down these rivers that the rich plant- 
ers, whose isolated plantations were scattered at 
wide intervals along the “bottoms,” used to 
despatch their corn and wheat, their oats and 
cotton, in keel-boats manned by the happiest 
slaves who ever sighed for freedom. Many a 
moon-lit night I have lain on my bed of cedar 
boughs on a high, breezy bluff of the Coosa- 
wattee and heard those merry-hearted boatmen 
go by with the current, playing the banjo and 
fluting on the genuine Pan-pipe of graded reed- 
joints.* Recalling the music, at this distance, 
it seems to me the most barbaric and withal 
the most fascinating imaginable. Usually, no 
matter how bright the night, they had a fire of 
pine-knots flaring at the boat’s prow, near 
which, on the rude floor of the forecastle, they 
* This pipe is, in fact, identical with the Syrizx or 
Pan-pipe of the ancients. I have seen and examined 
many of them, formed of from five to seven reed-joints, 
of graduated sizes, bound together in a row. The 
music is made by blowing the breath into the open ends 
of the reeds. There were some reed-blowers among 
the slaves of North Georgia who executed certain char- 
acteristic negra melodies with surprising effect. 
