ughed, and was about to make a good-natured reply, when
Sandy yelled out:

'Gwo enter the house and shet up, ye ---- ----.'

With this affectionate farewell, he turned his horse and led the way up
the road.

The dog, who was a short distance in advance, soon gave a piercing howl,
and started off at the speed of a reindeer. He had struck the trail, and
urging our horses to their fastest speed, we followed.

We were all well mounted, but the mare the Colonel had given me was a
magnificent animal, as fleet as the wind, and with a gait so easy that
her back seemed a rocking-chair. Saddle-horses at the South are trained
to the gallop--Southern riders deeming it unnecessary that one's
breakfast should be churned into a Dutch cheese by a trotting nag, in
order that one may pass for a good horseman.

We had ridden on at a perfect break-neck pace for half an hour, when the
Colonel shouted to our companion:

'Sandy, call the dog in; the horses won't last ten miles at this
gait--we've a long ride before us.'

The dirt-eater did as he was bidden, and we soon settled into a gentle
gallop.

We had passed through a dense forest of pines, but were emerging into a
'bottom country,' where some of the finest deciduous trees, then brown
and leafless, but bearing promise of the opening beauty of spring,
reared, along with the unfading evergreen, their tall stems in the air.
The live-oak, the sycamore, the Spanish mulberry, the mimosa, and the
persimmon, gayly festooned with wreaths of the white and yellow
jessamine, the woodbine and the cypress-moss, and bearing here and there
a bouquet of the mistletoe, with its deep green and glossy leaves
upturned to the sun--flung their broad arms over the road, forming an
archway grander and more beautiful than any the hand of man ever wove
for the greatest heroes the world has worshiped.

The woods were free from underbrush, but a coarse, wiry grass, unfit for
fodder, and scattered through them in detached patches, was the only
vegetation visible. The ground was mainly covered with the leaves and
burs of the pine.

We passed great numbers of swine, feeding on these burs, and now and
then a horned animal browsing on the cypress-moss where it hung low on
the trees. I observed that nearly all the swine were marked, though they
seemed too wild to have ever seen an owner, or a human habitation. They
were a long, lean, slab-sided race, with legs and shoulders like a deer,
and bearing no sort of