CHAPTER XII. 



THE BATTUE ON BONDA KEY. 



" The stout Earl of Northumberland 

 A vow to God did make, 

 His pleasure in the Scottish woods 

 Three summer days to take." 



Chevy Chasb. 



As the Ouithlacouchee Eiver 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 conglomerate shells, 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 clamping vines, and resembling those floating gardens 

 that the ingenious Celestials moor in the rivers of China. The 

 aquatic plants and nameless vines cover them with festoons, and 

 a large shoot striking down in the water anchors the raft, which 

 will float hither and thither by the wind, closing or opening 

 some water passage, to the great discomfiture of the bewildered 

 explorer. 



Beyond these ranker islets, and acting as outer piers or break- 

 waters to the still inner bays, lie other islands in long coral reefs, 

 covered by sea grass and a smaller growth of trees, and washed on 

 their outer sides by the surf of the Gulf. All of them abound in 



