,r 



Ixii LIFE OF WILSON. 



that the first thing you find them engaged in, after rising, is preparing the 

 brandy toddy. You can scarcely meet a man whose lips are not parched and 

 chopped or blistered with drinking this poison. Those who do not drink it, 

 they say, are sure of the ague. I, however, escaped. The pine woods have a 

 singular appearance, every tree being stripped, on one or more sides, of the 

 bark, for six or seven feet up. The turpentine covers these parts in thick 

 masses. I saw the people, in diflferent parts of the woods, mounted on benches, 

 chopping down the sides of the trees ; leaving a trough or box in the tree for 

 the turpentine to run into. Of hogs they have immense multitudes; one 

 person will sometimes own five hundred. The leaders have bells round their 

 necks ; and every drove knows its particular call, whether it be a conch-shell, 

 or the bawling of a negro, though half a mile off. Their owners will some- 

 times drive them for four or five days to a market, without once feeding them. 



" The taverns are the most desolate and beggarly imaginable : bare, bleak, 

 and dirty walls; — one or two old broken chairs, and a bench, form all the 

 furniture. The white females seldom make their appearance ; and every 

 thing must be transacted througli the medium of negroes. At supper, you 

 sit down to a meal, the very sight of which is sufiicient to deaden the most 

 eager appetite ; and you are surrounded by half a dozen dirty, half-naked 

 blacks, male and female, whom any man of common scent might smell a 

 quarter of a mile off. The house itself is raised upon props, four or five feet; 

 and the space below is left open for the hogs, with whose charming vocal per- 

 formance the wearied traveller is serenaded the whole night long, till he is 

 forced to curse the hogs, the house, and everything about it. 



"I crossed the river Taw at Washington, for Newbern, which stands upon 

 a sandy plain, between the rivers Trent and Neuse, both of which abound with 

 alligators. Here I found the shad fishery begun, on the 5th instant; and 

 wished to have some of you with me to assist in dissecting some of the finest 

 shad I ever saw. Thence to Wilmington was my next stage, one hundred 

 miles, with only one house for the accommodation of travellers on the road; 

 two landlords having been broken up with the fever. 



" The general features of North Carolina, where I crossed it, are immense, 

 solitary, pine savannas, through which the road winds among stagnant ponds, 

 swarming with alligators; dark, sluggish creeks, of the color of brandy, over 

 which lire thrown high wooden bridges, without railings, and so crazy and 

 rotten as not only to alarm one's horse, but also the rider, and to make it a 

 matter of thanksgiving with both when they get fairly over, without going 

 throvgh; enormous cypress swamps, which, to a stranger, have a striking, 

 desolate, and ruinous appearance. Picture to yourself a forest of prodigious 

 trees, rising, as thick as they can grow, from a vast flat and impenetrable morass, 

 covered for ten feet from the ground with reeds. The leafless limbs of the 

 cypresses are clothed with an extraordinary kind of moss {Tillandsia usneoides), 

 from two to ten feet long, in such quantities, that fifty men might conceal 

 themselves in one tree. Nothing in this country struck me with such surprise 

 as the prospect of several thousand acres of such timber, loaded, as it were, 

 with many million tons of tow, waving in the wind. I attempted to penetrate 

 several of these swamps, with my gun, in search of something new ; but, except 



