66 RAMBLES OF 



mazes nothing but a fox, wild cat, or weasel, could thread. 

 The soil cleared for cultivation is very generally poor, 

 light, and sandy, though readily susceptible of improve- 

 ment, and yielding a considerable produce in Indian corn, 

 and most of the early garden vegetables, by the raising 

 of which for the Baltimore market the inhabitants obtain 

 all their ready money. The blight of slavery has long 

 extended its influence over this region, where all its usual 

 effects are but too obviously visible. The white inhabit- 

 ants are few in number, widely distant from each other, 

 and manifest, in. their mismanagement and half indigent 

 circumstances, how trifling an advantage they derive 

 from the thraldom of their dozen or more of sturdy 

 blacks, of different sexes and ages. The number of 

 marshes formed at the heads of the creeks, render this 

 country frightfully unhealthy in autumn, at which time 

 the life of a resident physician is one of incessant toil 

 and severe privation. Riding from morning till night, 

 to get round to visit a few patients, his road leads gener- 

 ally through pine forests, whose aged and lofty trees, en- 

 circled by a dense undergrowth, impart an air of sombre 

 and unbroken solitude. Rarely or never does he en- 

 counter a white person on his way, and only once in a 

 while will he see a miserably tattered negro, seated on a 

 sack of corn, carried by a starveling horse or mule, which 

 seems poorly able to bear the weight to the nearest mill. 

 The red-head woodpecker, and the flicker or yellow- 

 hammer, a kindred species, occasionally glance across his 



