88 
LETTERS FROM ALABAMA. 
land is planted with Indian corn. No plongh has 
turned up the soil, nor even a harrow scratched its 
surface ; so soft and mellow is it with the accumu- 
lated vegetable mould of ages, that it needs hut a 
hole to he made with the hoe, and the seed-coim 
deposited, to ensure an ahundant harvest. No 
further trouble is taken with the trees ; the branches 
decay and drop off piecemeal, and by-and-by the 
sapless trunks themselves, one at a time, come down 
with a crash, and scatter the earth beneath them. 
This custom of girdling the trees instead of cutting 
them down gives the fields a most singular appear- 
ance. After the twigs and smaller boughs have 
dropped off, and the bark has dried and shrunk, 
and been stripped away, and the naked branches 
have become blanched by the summer’s sun and 
winter’s rain, these tall dead trunks, so thickly 
spread over the land, look like an army of skeletons 
stretching their gaunt white arms, clothed with 
long ragged festoons of Spanish moss ( Tillandsia 
usneoides)^ across the field. They are not unat- 
tended with danger, but the risk of damage to the 
crop, and even to human life, is not considered to 
countervail the great saving of labour attending 
this mode of clearing ; and they chiefly fall in the 
storms of winter, when the labours of the field are 
suspended. They form an unfailing resource for 
the Woodpeckers, all kinds of which, from the noble 
Ivory-billed to the little Downy, are incessantly 
tapping at their sapless trunks. The Ked-tailed 
Hawk [Falco horealis) frequently chooses them as 
his watch tower, whence his large fiery eye gleams 
on his prey below, and now and then, as if impa- 
tient of rest, he flies from one to another with 
a sudden scream. But more especially the Turkey 
