CHAPTER XXI. 



Indian Mounds and Block-house at Macon, Georgia. Fashionists. Fune 

 ral of Northern Man. Geology and silicified Corals and Shells. Stage 

 traveling to Milledgeville. Negro Children. Home-made Soap. De 

 composition of Gneiss. Deep Ravines recently excavated after clearing 

 of Forest. Man shot in a Brawl. Disappointed Place-Hunter. Lynch 

 Law in Florida. Repeal of English Corn-Laws. War Spirit abating. 



Jan. 15, 1846. WHEN I was within twenty miles of Macon, 

 I left the hand-car and entered a railway-train, which carried me 

 in one hour into the town. About a mile south of the place we 

 passed the base of two conical Indian mounds, the finest monu 

 ments of the kind I had ever seen. The first appearance of a 

 large-steam vessel ascending one of the western tributaries of the 

 Mississippi, before a single Indian has been dispossessed of his 

 hunting grounds, or a single tree of the native forest has been 

 felled, scarcely affords a more striking picture of a wilderness in 

 vaded by the arts of civilized life, than Macon, in Georgia, re 

 sounding to the sound of a locomotive engine. On entering 1 the 

 town, my eye was caught by a striking object, a wooden edifice 

 of very peculiar structure and picturesque form, crowning one of 

 the hills in the suburbs. This, I was told, on inquiry, was a 

 block-house, actually in use against the Indians only twenty-five 

 years ago, before any habitations of the white men were to be 

 seen in the forest here. It was precisely one of those wooden 

 forts so faithfully described by Cooper in the &quot; Path-finder.&quot; 

 After the mind has become interested with such antiquities, it is 

 carried back the next moment to the modern state of things by 

 an extraordinary revulsion, when a fellow-passenger, proud of the 

 sudden growth of his adopted city, tells you that another large 

 building, also conspicuous on a height, is a female seminary lately 

 established by the Methodists, &quot; where all the young ladies take 

 degrees ;&quot; and then, as you pace the streets with your baggage 

 to the hotel, another says to you, &quot; There go two of our fashion- 



