68 R A M B L E S O F 



susceptible of improvement, and yielding a consider- 

 able 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 ex- 

 tended its influence over this region, where all its 

 usual effects are but too obviously visible. The 

 white inhabitants are few in number, widely distant 

 from each other; and manifest, in their mismanage/- 

 ment 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 generally 

 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 encounter 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 starve- 

 ling horse or mule, which seems poorly able to bear 

 the weight to the nearest mill. The red-head wood- 

 pecker and the flicker, or yellow-hammer, a kindred 

 species, occasionally glance across his path; some- 

 times, when he turns his horse to drink at the dark- 

 coloured branch (as such streams are locally called), 

 he disturbs a solitary rufous-thrush engaged in wash- 



