Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy. | 
Six Months. $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 , 1911 . 1 
VOL. LXXVII.—No. 15 
i No. 127 Franklin St., New York. 
LAKE DRUMMOND IN AUTUMN. 
The Real Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond 
M ANY years ago, when I was not long in my 
teens, my youthful imagination was held 
captive by a book called “Dred, a Tale 
of the Dismal Swamp,” by Mrs. Harriett Beecher 
Stowe, whose more widely known “Uncle Tom’s 
Cabin” made her name one to be conjured with 
in the North and objured in the South. It is 
ancient history now, but on reading this story 
of Dred's adventures in that primitive region, 
now at our doors, as it were, I further sealed 
my doom by having once to recite Tom Moore’s 
weird verses anent the “Indian Hunter’s Camp” 
from which — 
By WILLIAM PERRY BROWN 
“The maid and her lover true 
Are seen at the hour of midnight damp, 
To cross the lake by a firefly lamp, 
Paddling their white canoe.” 
I said to myself that if I lived I would one 
day explore that swamp for myself and see how 
much or how little of the novelist’s and poet’s 
lure was substratified in fact. 
The years elapsed. The youthful impulse lan¬ 
guished, but did not die. It happened meantime 
that I roamed and hunted and boated through 
the Okefenokee Swamp on the borders of Geor¬ 
gia and Florida, and threaded the edges of the 
Everglades that fill much of the southern end 
of the Peninsula State. But the time came when 
I could visit the Dismal Swamp first nearly ten 
years ago, and lastly during a recent late autumn 
and early winter trip, part of which was along 
the North Carolina coast. 
The Great Dismal Swamp remains to-day, in 
spite of loggers and certain attempts at agricul¬ 
tural reclamation, much as it has been for a cen¬ 
tury. Intrinsically, it is the reverse of dismal; 
it is a virgin wilderness paradise. Like all great 
swamps of the South Atlantic seaboard, it was 
made by the elevation of the old ocean bed. This 
