Letter from Audubon to the Editor. 531 



for no sooner had we left the King's Road,* than we entered 

 first a thick scrub, succeeded by a still thicker mass of low pal- 

 mettoes, extending about three miles, where we came in full 

 view of what in this very interesting peninsula, goes by the ex- 

 pressive name of a Pine Barren. 



I wish I had the talent to paint what a Pine Barren in the 

 Floridas is. May God continue his blessings to me, and may he 

 ever preserve you from having any thing to do with a Pine Bar- 

 ren in the southern part of the Floridas ! 



The sky was pure, the pine trees far apart, beneath our feet 

 nothing but sand and tall grass. The general growth low pal- 

 mettoes tangled together, and the mere Indian path we were 

 following, was so narrow, and of so doubtful a character, that at 

 every step which our Floridian poneys took, we felt as if we 

 certainly had at length got into the vicinity of the far famed end 

 of the world, and our expectations were of course screwed up 

 accordingly. 



These Pine Barrens differ from all those I had seen before. 

 The sand is thinly covered with a very poor kind of yellow pine, 

 growing from amongst tall rank grass as far as the eye can reach 

 on all sides. The country is perfectly flat, and subject to general 

 inundations after the constant rains that fall in this latitude, in 

 early spring. At such times it is impossible to cross these bar- 

 rens, and even now, after a period of extremely dry weather, 

 we were frequently in mud and water up to the girths of the 

 horses. Large patches of grass presented themselves here and 

 there, like so many worn out meadows or prairies, then again 

 came the pine barrens. Whenever the surface became hol- 

 lower, it was covered with cypress trees hung with Spanish 

 moss, growing out of the deep black mud, and overgrown with 

 all sorts of scrubby bushes of the magnolia family. 



We crossed in succession the heads of three branches of Haw 

 Creek, from a quarter to half a mile in width : we got through 

 them with some difficulty. After traveling about twenty miles, 

 at the rate of two and a half miles an hour, a great change 

 took place ; the country became suddenly more elevated and un- 

 dulating. The timber also changed to red oaks, magnolias, a 

 few live oaks and pines, millions of molehills, called here sala- 



* This road, which runs parallel with the coast, was opened when East Florida 

 belonged to the Crown of Spain. 



