LIFE OF WILSON. 
Ixxxix 
make their appearance; 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 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 every thing 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 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, co- 
vered 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 w*ere, with many million tons of tow, waving in the wind. 
VOL. I. — M 
