reflections of their tints; while in this hideous and
apparently boundless pine barren, you are deprived alike of horizon before
you and heaven above you: nor sun nor star appears through the thick
covert, which, in the shabby dinginess of its dark blue-green expanse,
looks like a gigantic cotton umbrella stretched immeasurably over you. It
is true that over that sandy soil a dark green cotton umbrella is a very
welcome protection from the sun, and when the wind makes music in the tall
pine-tops and refreshment in the air beneath them. The comparison may seem
ungrateful enough: to-day, however, there was neither sound above nor
motion below, and the heat was perfectly stifling, as we ploughed our way
through the resinous-smelling sand solitudes.

From time to time a thicket of exquisite evergreen shrubs broke the
monotonous lines of the countless pine shafts rising round us, and still
more welcome were the golden garlands of the exquisite wild jasmine,
hanging, drooping, trailing, clinging, climbing through the dreary forest,
joining to the warm aromatic smell of the fir trees a delicious fragrance
as of acres of heliotrope in bloom. I wonder if this delightful creature
is very difficult of cultivation out of its natural region; I never
remember to have seen it, at least not in blossom, in any collection of
plants in the Northern States or in Europe, where it certainly deserves an
honourable place for its grace, beauty, and fragrance.

On our drive we passed occasionally a tattered man or woman, whose yellow
mud complexion, straight features, and singularly sinister countenance
bespoke an entirely different race from the negro population in the midst
of which they lived. These are the so-called pine-landers of Georgia, I
suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon
origin that can be found on the face of the earth,--filthy, lazy,
ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler
attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of
savage nature. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception
abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would
reduce them to an equality with the abhorred negroes; they squat, and
steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilised
societies, and their countenances bear witness to the squalor of their
condition and the utter degradation of their natures. To the crime of
slavery, though