Ixii 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
that the first thing you find them engaged in, after rising, is preparing the 
brandy tuJihj. 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 si.M or seven feet up. The turpentine covers these parts in thick 
masses. I saw the people, in different 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 fur four or five days to a uiarket, 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 apj^earance ; and every 
thing 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 
black.s, 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 fur 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 W'hich 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. 
" Tlie general features of North Carolina, where I crossed it, are immense, 
solitai-y, [line savannas, through which the road Avinds among stagnant ponds, 
swarming with alligators; dark, sluggish creeks, of the color 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 thmiksgiving with both when they get fairly ore/-, witliout going 
tlirovijli ; enornious ej'press 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, fmra 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 {Tillnu<hia usueoides'), 
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 
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