ut it is
tertiary and drift or modern terrace; but its first eighty miles from
its mouth are broad as a bay of the sea, and its narrow upper course
above Pilatka, where current supersedes tide, is all one dream of
Eden,--an infinitely tortuous avenue, peopled with myriads of beautiful
wild-birds, roofed by overhanging branches of oak, magnolia, and
cypress, draped with the moss that tones down those solitudes into a
sort of day-moonlight, and, in the greatest contrast with this,
festooned by the lavish clusters of odorous yellow jasmine and many-hued
morning-glory,--the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths
of every old stump along the plashy brink,--the former swinging from
tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle
of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, and censers of
bewildering fragrance.

To the hunting, fishing, and exploration of such a river I was never
sorry that I had brought my own boat. It was one of the
_chefs-d'oeuvres_ of my old schoolmate Ingersoll,--a copper-fastened,
clinker-built pleasure-boat, pulling two pairs of sculls, fifteen feet
long, comfortably accommodating six persons, and adorned by the builder
with a complimentary blue and gilt backboard of mahogany and a pair of
presentation tiller-ropes twisted from white and crimson silk.

In this boat I and the companion of my exile took much comfort. When we
intended only a short row,--some trifle of ten or twelve miles,--we
always pulled for ourselves; but on long tours, where the faculties of
observation would have been impaired by the fatigue of action, we
employed as our oarsman a black man whom I shall call Sol Cutter,--not
knowing on which side of the lines he may be at present.

Sol, when we first discovered him, was hovering around the Jacksonville
wharves, looking for a job. It is so novel to see that kind of thing in
the South, that I asked him if he was a free negro. He replied, that he
was the slave of a gentleman who allowed him to buy his time. He said
"allowed"; but I suspect that the truer, though less delicate, way of
putting it would have been to say "obliged" him to, for the sake of a
living. Sol's "Mossa Cutter" had remaining to him none of the paternal
acres; and it never having occurred to him, that, when lands and houses
all are spent, then learning is most excellent, he possessed none of
that _nous_ which would have enabled a Northern man to outflank
embarrassments by dir