108 THE SEA-SERPENT. 



tude you are adrift without a compass ! What 

 have you to do with the ea-serpent ? He is the 

 peculiar property of New England, he never con- 

 descends to show himself elsewhere, he is of the 

 Pilgrim States, their very specialty ; as much and 

 as exclusively theirs, as the gift of witchcraft, the 

 privilege of detecting, and the divine right of pun- 

 ishing it. "With what propriety, therefore, can you 

 pretend to introduce him in a book of " Carolina 

 Sports?" 



Have patience ! most choleric reader ! Patience 

 is a piscatory as well as an Apostolic virtue ; as 

 needful (you may find,) to the reader of fish stories, 

 as to the fisherman himself. Patience, and we shall 

 see. 



The March winds were whistling sharply, as is 

 their wont, along the southern Atlantic sea-board, 

 when the gallant steamer Win. Seabrook loosed her 

 hawser from the wharf at Savannah to which elio 

 had been moored, and pressed forward on her inland 

 voyage to Charleston. At her wheel stood her 

 stalwart commander, Blanking n>, long known and 

 well reputed in all the region roundabout. And 

 now the steamer glides through the yellow waters 

 of the Savannah River, between fields celebrated 

 for their production of rice, and enriched by the 

 deposit from these same turbid yellow waters, until 



