the huge oaks and swing from tree to tree, linking
limb with limb: the tree-tops are purple with great fruit-clusters. To
the whole scene the dwarf palmetto gives a semi-tropic aspect. There
are no signs of life, save a lizard darting over the leaves, stopping
midway to look at you with bright eyes. In the evening the squirrels
come out in countless numbers, and their crashing leaps may be heard in
all directions; bright cardinal-birds, Florida jays and gay nonpareils
enliven the gloom; the jays chatter in the branches and mocking-birds
carol from the topmost limbs. It is one of the joys of earth to walk
through the Grand Avenue of Dungeness at sunset.

There were, when the estate was in prosperous condition, eleven miles of
avenues, seven miles of beach, eight miles of walks and nine miles of
open roads. Grand Avenue, running midway the length of the island, was
cleared eighteen miles, to High Point. There are now but three miles
cleared, but you can look straight down beneath the arch of live-oaks
for more than a mile of its length. From the Sound to the beach,
crossing Central Avenue, ran River Avenue for a distance of about a
mile.

This live-oak forest, which covers several thousand acres, is densely
filled with scrub palmetto, impenetrable almost, and so difficult to
pierce that the deer with which the forest swarms choose the old paths
and roadways in their walks from sleeping- to feeding-grounds. The
hunters take advantage of this, and after starting their dogs in the
scrub post themselves on the main avenues where the paths intersect, and
shoot the deer as they jump out. The deer of the island are estimated by
thousands, and a State law which prohibits the hunting of deer with
dogs, except with the owner's permission, has aided in their increase.
Halfway up the island are numerous ponds, to which ducks resort in the
winter in vast numbers. Bear are plentiful in the deep woods, and their
tracks, with those of the deer in greater abundance, are often found
crossing the abandoned fields.

Three hundred feet in width, hard as stone, shell-strewn, between
wind-hollowed sand-dunes and foaming surf, this beach of Cumberland
stretches for twenty miles. The sands that border it are covered with a
network of beautiful convolvulus, tufts of sea-oats with nodding plumes,
and picturesque clumps of Spanish bayonet (_Yucca gloriosa_) with
pyramids of snowy flowers. This and the prickly pear suggest the climate
of the trop