g fires of the resinous wood
of the pine, wherever they were at work. The tracts of sandy soil, we
perceived, were interspersed with marshes, crowded with cypress-trees, and
verdant at their borders with a growth of evergreens, such as the
swamp-bay, the gallberry, the holly, and various kinds of evergreen
creepers, which are unknown to our northern climate, and which became more
frequent as we proceeded.

We passed through extensive forests of pine, which had been _boxed_, as it
is called, for the collection of turpentine. Every tree had been scored by
the axe upon one of its sides, some of them as high as the arm could reach
down to the roots, and the broad wound was covered with the turpentine,
which seems to saturate every fibre of the long-leaved pine. Sometimes we
saw large flakes or crusts of the turpentine of a light-yellow color,
which had fallen, and lay beside the tree on the ground. The collection of
turpentine is a work of destruction; it strips acre after acre of these
noble trees, and, if it goes on, the time is not far distant when the
long-leaved pine will become nearly extinct in this region, which is so
sterile as hardly to be fitted for producing any thing else. We saw large
tracts covered with the standing trunks of trees already killed by it; and
other tracts beside them had been freshly attacked by the spoiler. I am
told that the tree which grows up when the long-leaved pine is destroyed,
is the loblolly pine, or, as it is sometimes called, the short-leaved
pine, a tree of very inferior quality and in little esteem.

About half-past two in the afternoon, we came to Wilmington, a little town
built upon the white sands of Cape Fear, some of the houses standing where
not a blade of grass or other plant can grow. A few evergreen oaks, in
places, pleasantly overhang the water. Here we took the steamer for
Charleston.

I may as well mention here a fraud which is sometimes practiced upon those
who go by this route to Charleston. Advertisements are distributed at New
York and elsewhere, informing the public that the fare from Baltimore to
Charleston, by the railway through Washington and Richmond, is but
twenty-two dollars. I took the railway, paying from place to place as I
went, and found that this was a falsehood; I was made to pay seven or
eight dollars more. In the course of my journey, I was told that, to
protect myself from this imposition, I should have purchased at Baltimore
a "through ticket,"