th I brought back with me from the Wilderness helped me,
no doubt, through the attack of pneumonia and pleurisy, which
released me in the early spring, when I was ordered off to Florida to
recuperate. Being advised not to occupy myself with painting while
there, I bought a photographic apparatus, and learned photography
as it was practiced in 1857,--a rude, inefficient, and cumbersome
apparatus and process for field work, of which few amateurs nowadays
can conceive the inconveniences.

This trip--for the means to make which I was indebted to Norton, my
illness having exhausted my resources, and the great crisis which had
broken over New York the year before having swept off the fortune of
my brother--gave me a sight of the South before the war, with slavery
and the patriarchal system at its perfection. I went up the St. John's
River, and took board at a plantation called Hibernia, one of numerous
similar establishments on the river, hotels proper not existing there.
The owner of the plantation, old Colonel Fleming, was one of the
traditional patriarchal planters, and the experience I gained there
certainly agreed with the views of the institution of slavery
entertained by the great majority of Southern people I have known. I
never heard of the punishment of a slave, or saw a discontented negro;
the black children were the jolliest little creatures I ever saw in
clothes, and the adults seemed to do as much or as little work as they
pleased.

I had carried my rifle with me, and young Fleming and I used to go
hunting for alligators, still abundant in the river. The thickets
of palmetto and the groves of magnolia filling the air with new and
cloying fragrance, alternating with other unaccustomed odors which
made the grove resemble an orchestra of perfumes, were to me a new and
delightful experience. There was a mythical wild turkey in the woods
around, and the hope of a shot at him carried me many a mile, though
he proved only a myth; but of rattlesnakes and copperheads there was
no lack. As I was collecting specimens for the natural-history museum
of Cambridge, I canned the largest snakes that I came across, and I
secured one rattlesnake which measured nine feet; but the fear of his
kind never damped my enthusiasm for the luxuriant forest. Into the
great cypress swamps, with their centennial trees, swarming with
reptiles of infinite variety, there run devious inlets which they call
"creeks," and up these I used to paddle