122 THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA. 
retreats: these they find near the sea-shore, especially in North and 
South Carolina, in low swampy levels, the haunt of yellow fever. 
Such morasses—an ancient arm of the sea or a river, an old swamp 
left behind in the gradual recession of the waters—extend sometimes 
over a length of five or six miles, and a breadth of one mile. The 
entry is not very inviting: a barrier of trees confronts you, their 
trunks perfectly upright and stripped of branches, fifty or sixty feet 
high, and bare to the very summit, where they mingle and bring to- 
gether their leafy arches of sombre green, so as to shed upon the 
waters an ominous twilight. What waters! A seething mass of 
leaves and débris, where the old stems rise pell-mell one upon another ; 
the whole of a muddy yellow colour, coated on the surface with a 
green frothy moss. Advance, and the seemingly firm expanse is a 
quicksand, into which you plunge. A laurel-tree at each step inter- 
cepts you; you cannot pass without a painful struggle with their 
branches, with wrecks of trees, with laurels constantly springing up 
afresh. Rare gleams of light shoot athwart the darkness, and the 
silence of death prevails in these terrible regions. Except the mel- 
ancholy notes of two or three small birds, which you catch at intervals, 
or the hoarse cry of the heron, all is dumb and desolate; but when 
the wind rises, from the summit of the trees comes the heron’s moans 
and sighs. If the storm bursts, these great naked cedars, these tall 
“ammiral’s masts,” waver and clash together; the forest roars, cries, 
groans, and imitates with singular exactness the voices of wolves, and 
bears, and all the beasts of prey. 
It was not then without astonishment that, about 1805, the heron, 
thus securely settled, saw a rare face, a man’s, roaming under their 
cedars, and in the open swamp. One man alone was capable of visiting 
them in their haunts, a patient indefatigable traveller, no less courageous 
than peaceable—the friend and the admirer of birds, Alexander Wilson. 
If these people had been acquainted with their visitor’s character, 
far from feeling terrified at his appearance, they would undoubtedly 
have gone forth to meet him, and, with clapping of wings and loud 
cries, have given him an amicable salute, a fraternal ovation. 
