and as to this once pretty road, it
looks 'forlorn,' as a worthy Pennsylvania farmer's wife once said to me of
a pretty hill-side from which her husband had ruthlessly felled a
beautiful grove of trees.

I had another snake encounter in my ride this morning. Just as I had
walked my horse through the swamp, and while contemplating ruefully its
naked aspect, a huge black snake wriggled rapidly across the path, and I
pulled my reins tight and opened my mouth wide with horror. These
hideous-looking creatures are, I believe, not poisonous, but they grow to
a monstrous size, and have tremendous _constrictive_ power. I have heard
stories that sound like the nightmare, of their fighting desperately with
those deadly creatures, rattlesnakes. I cannot conceive, if the black
snakes are not poisonous, what chance they have against such antagonists,
let their squeezing powers be what they will. How horrid it did look,
_slithering_ over the road! Perhaps the swamp has been cleared on account
of its harbouring these dreadful worms.

I rode home very fast, in spite of the exquisite fragrance of the wild
cherry blossoms, the carpets and curtains of wild flowers, among which a
sort of glorified dandelion glowed conspicuously; dandelions such as I
should think grew in the garden of Eden, if there were any at all there. I
passed the finest magnolia that I have yet seen; it was magnificent, and
I suppose had been spared for its beauty, for it grew in the very middle
of a cotton field; it was as large as a fine forest tree, and its huge
glittering leaves shone like plates of metal in the sun; what a spectacle
that tree must be in blossom, and I should think its perfume must be smelt
from one end of the plantation to the other. What a glorious creature!
Which do you think ought to weigh most in the scale, the delight of such a
vegetable, or the disgust of the black animal I had just met a few minutes
before? Would you take the one with the other? Neither would I.

I have spent the whole afternoon at home; my 'gang' is busily at work
again. Sawney, one of them, came to join it nearly at sun-down, not having
got through his day's task before. In watching and listening to these
lads, I was constantly struck with the insolent tyranny of their demeanour
towards each other. This is almost a universal characteristic of the
manner of the negroes among themselves. They are diabolically cruel to
animals too, and they seem to me as a rule hardly to kno