ALEXANDER WILSON. 
lxiii 
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 sometimes 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 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 inst. and wished to have some of you 
with me to assist in dissecting some of the finest 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, covered for ten feet from the 
ground with reeds. The leafless limbs of the cypresses are clothed 
