THE BATTUE ON BONDA KEY. 175 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE BATTUE ON BONDA KEY. 



" The stout Earl of Nortliumberland 



A vow to God did make, 

 His pleasure in the Scottish woods 

 Three summer days to take." 



Chevy Chase. 



As the Ouithlacouchee River emerges from the bayous, 

 lakes, swamps, and drowned lands, which it has drained 

 for many a square league, and reaches the salt water, it 

 widens its bed, and harassed by the heavy beat of the 

 sea, deposits its accumulation of vegetable matter with 

 the sands of the ocean in little islands, that are presently 

 covered with the rankest vegetation. There grows the 

 cane like a gigantic grass, and the cabbage palmetto 

 there rears its huge, twisting, bayonet bristling trunk- 

 like the fanciful verdure of Utopian land. Sometimes 

 these islands are based on the sand, and are as stable as 

 the main land, but again they are the mere accumulations 

 of floating vegetable matter, rank weeds, and decaying 

 rafts of trees, lashed together by sea-weeds and clamp- 

 ing vines, and resembling those floating gardens that the 

 ingenious Celestials moor in the great rivers of China. 

 The aquatic plants and nameless vines cover them with 

 festoons, and a large shoot striking down in the water 



