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, 
