104 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 



oaks, magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, 

 maples, and hickories, with here and there a 

 long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. 

 The palmettos, most distinctively Southern 

 of them all, had been badly used by their 

 hardier neighbors ; they looked stunted, and 

 almost without exception had been forced 

 out of their normal perpendicular attitude. 

 The live-oaks, on the other hand, were noble 

 specimens ; lofty and wide-spreading, elm- 

 like in habit, it seemed to me, though not 

 without the sturdiness which belongs as by 

 right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the 

 American elm. 



What gave its peculiar tropical character 

 to the wood, however, was not so much the 

 trees as the profusion of plants that covered 

 them and depended from them: air-plants 

 (Tillandsia), large and small, like pine- 

 apples, with which they claim a family re- 

 lationship, the exuberant hanging moss, 

 itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. 

 The ferns, a species of polypody (" resur- 

 rection ferns," I heard them called), com- 

 pletely covered the upper surface of many 

 of the larger branches, while the huge vines 

 twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often, 



