lxii LIFE OF 



bench, form all the furniture. The white females seldom make their 

 appearance, and everything must be transacted through the medium 

 of negroes. At supper, you sit down to a meal, the very sight of 

 which is sufficient 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 performance 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 inst., and wished to have some of you with me to 

 assist in dissecting some of the finest I ever saw. Thence to Wil- 

 mington 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 colour of brandy, over which are 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 

 through ; 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 mneoides), 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 in some 



