50 SYLVAN SECRETS. 



voices that touched the imagination strangely 

 enough. 



My boatmen, both of whom were Creoles, 

 so-called, could not imagine why I should 

 have taken such a considerable voyage 

 merely to stay a few days on a sand-bank 

 reading books under a tent-fly, or to make 

 journeys into a dismal and lonely swamp, 

 neither of which would have afforded them 

 any pleasure whatever. They evidently 

 deemed my motives obscure and mysterious, 

 if not wholly unchristian. 



I chose this particular place more by acci- 

 dent than otherwise, but it proved to be the 

 best for my purposes that I could possibly 

 have found. The sand ridge ran for a long 

 way back into the swamp, and thus gave me 

 a safe and easy road to the heart of a typical 

 jungle. 



The outer fringe of the swamp growth was 

 si line of marsh grass growing about waist- 

 high and of a dusky olive-green in color. 

 Next came a dense growth of cane with scat- 

 tering clusters of bay trees, then a hummock 

 of live-oaks, beyond which, lonely, gloomy, 

 and set in eternal wastes of water and mud, 

 stretched the moss-hung cypress forests and 

 magnolia groves. From a little way out to 

 sea this vast jungle had the appearance of a 

 mass of low hills running in a billowy line 

 against the sky. 



No one without actual experience in ex- 

 ploring such a region can form any adequate 

 idea of even the general effect of its features. 



Except where the cypress trees grow thin 

 in basins of water the plants of all kinds, 

 from immense live oaks down to the smallest 

 aquatic weeds, are packed together so that 

 one can scarcely force a way through them. 



