sundry exclamations of delight from
the sooty circle below, and one woman, grinning from ear to ear, and
displaying a most dazzling set of grinders, drew forward a little
mahogany-colored imp, her grandchild, and offered her to the little
"Missis" for her waiting-maid. I told her the little missis waited upon
herself; whereupon she set up a most incredulous giggle, and reiterated
her proffers, in the midst of which our kettle started off, and we left
her.

To describe to you the tract of country through which we now passed
would be impossible, so forlorn a region it never entered my imagination
to conceive. Dismal by nature, indeed, as well as by name, is that vast
swamp, of which we now skirted the northern edge, looking into its
endless pools of black water, where the melancholy cypress and
juniper-trees alone overshadowed the thick-looking surface, their roots
all globular, like huge bulbous plants, and their dark branches woven
together with a hideous matting of giant creepers, which clung round
their stems, and hung about the dreary forest like a drapery of withered
snakes.

It looked like some blasted region lying under an enchanter's ban, such
as one reads of in old stories. Nothing lived or moved throughout the
loathsome solitude, and the sunbeams themselves seemed to sicken and
grow pale as they glided like ghosts through these watery woods. Into
this wilderness it seems impossible that the hand of human industry, or
the foot of human wayfaring should ever penetrate; no wholesome growth
can take root in its slimy depths; a wild jungle chokes up parts of it
with a reedy, rattling covert for venomous reptiles; the rest is a
succession of black ponds, sweltering under black cypress boughs,--a
place forbid.

The wood which is cut upon its borders is obliged to be felled in
winter, for the summer, which clothes other regions with flowers, makes
this pestilential waste alive with rattlesnakes, so that none dare
venture within its bounds, and I should even apprehend that, traveling
as rapidly as one does on the railroad, and only skirting this district
of dismay, one might not escape the fetid breathings it sends forth when
the warm season has quickened its stagnant waters and poisonous
vegetation.

After passing this place, we entered upon a country little more cheerful
in its aspect, though the absence of the dark swamp water was something
in its favor,--apparently endless tracts of pine-forest, well called by