122 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



"expected conjunction. The pilot left us when we got 



" within the bay, up which we are rapidly sailing with a 



" fair breeze, in delightful weather." 



He was conscious of great depression of spirits as he 

 walked that evening through the streets of the city of 

 Mobile. The experiment, indeed, which had brought him 

 so far from all his associations was a bold one. He had no 

 certainty of any welcome in the strange, crude country 

 into which he was about to penetrate, and it came upon 

 him with a shock that he had but one letter of introduction 

 in his wallet, and that given to him by a stranger. Next 

 morning this distressing feeling had worn off. He was 

 glad to be on shore again, and he spent the greater part of 

 the day in roaming about the woods in the vicinity of 

 Mobile, where he found great numbers of interesting in- 

 sects. Near the shore he met with impenetrable hedges 

 of prickly pear, studded with its handsome flowers and 

 purple fruit. The latter he rashly tasted, to find his 

 mouth filled with an agony of fine spines, which gave him 

 infinite toil and pain to tear out. 



There was nothing to detain him in Mobile, and that 

 same evening he took passage in the Farmer, one of the fine 

 high-pressure steamers which thronged the Mobile wharves, 

 fifty years ago, far more abundantly than they do now, since 

 at that time the commerce of the city almost promised to 

 rival that of New Orleans. After a voyage of two nights 

 and a day spent in following the interminable windings of 

 the Alabama river, a voyage through a country which had 

 no towns or villages, and scarcely a sign of life, except at 

 the occasional wood-yards in the forest, the vessel arrived 

 at King's Landing. It so happened that a fellow-passenger 

 on board the Farmer was the Hon. Chief Justice Reuben 

 Saffold, a jurist then of great eminence in the South, who 

 had done good service in the Indian troubles, and had for 



