ines. The land sloped downward
slightly, and after a while the ridge behind me seemed like a line of
heights, the old cotton-plants on its top standing out as distinctly as
single pine-trees on a mountain-summit outlined against the sky; so
comparative is height. The crows still flew westward as I came out upon
a second level lower down than the first, and caught a golden gleam
through the fringe of bushes in the middle of the plain. I had
unwittingly found the river at last, that broad, brown river that I knew
was down there somewhere, although I had not seen it with my bodily
eyes. I had full knowledge of what it was, though, farther south toward
the ocean; I knew the long trestles over the swamps and dark canebrakes
that stretched out for miles on each side of the actual stream--trestles
over which the trains passed cautiously every day, the Northern
passengers looking nervously down at the quaking, spongy surface below,
and prophesying accidents as certain some time--when they were not on
board. Up here in the cotton country, however, the river was more
docile; there were no tides to come up and destroy the banks, and with
the exception of freshets the habits of the stream were orderly. The
levels on each side might have been, should have been, rich with plenty.
Instead, they were uncultivated and desolate. Here and there a wild,
outlawed cotton-bush reared its head, and I could trace the old line of
the cart-road and cross-tracks; but the soil was spongy and
disintegrated, and for a long time evidently no care had been bestowed
upon it. I crossed over to the river, and found that the earth-bank
which had protected the field was broken down and washed away in many
places; the low trees and bushes on shore still held the straws and
driftwood that showed the last freshet's high-water mark.

The river made an irregular bend a short distance below, and I strolled
that way, walking now on the thick masses of lespedeza that carpeted the
old road-track, and now on the singularly porous soil of the level, a
soil which even my inexperienced eyes recognized as worthless, all its
good particles having been drained out of it and borne away on the
triumphant tide of the freshets. The crows still evaded me, crossing the
river in a straight line and flying on toward the west, and, in that
arbitrary way in which solitary pedestrians make compacts with
themselves, I said, "I will go to that tree at the exact turn of the
bend, and no