yself away from
my many new friends and retraced my steps to Morehead City, leaving it
on Tuesday, January 5th, and rowing down the little sound called Bogue
towards Cape Fear.

As night came on I discovered on the shore a grass cabin, which was on
the plantation of Dr. Emmett, and had been left tenantless by some
fisherman. This served for shelter during the night, though the
struggles and squealings of a drove of hogs attempting to enter through
the rickety door did not contribute much to my repose.

The watercourses now became more intricate, growing narrower as I rowed
southward. The open waters of the sound were left behind, and I entered
a labyrinth of creeks and small sheets of water, which form a network in
the marshes between the sandy beach-islands and the mainland all the way
to Cape Fear River. The Core Sound sheet of the United States Coast
Survey ended at Cape Lookout, there being no charts of the route to
Masonboro. I was therefore now travelling upon _local_ knowledge, which
proves usually a very uncertain guide.

In a cold rain the canoe reached the little village of Swansboro, where
the chief personage of the place of two hundred inhabitants, Mr. McLain,
removed me from my temporary camping-place in an old house near the
turpentine distilleries into his own comfortable quarters.

There are twenty mullet fisheries within ten miles of Swansboro, which
employ from fifteen to eighteen men each. The pickled and dried roe of
this fish is shipped to Wilmington and to Cincinnati. Wild-fowls abound,
and the shooting is excellent. The fishermen say flocks of ducks seven
miles in length have been seen on the waters of Bogue Sound.
Canvas-backs are called "raft-ducks" here, and they sell from twelve to
twenty cents each. Wild geese bring forty cents, and brant thirty.

The marsh-ponies feed upon the beaches, in a half wild state, with the
deer and cattle, cross the marshes and swim the streams from the
mainland to the beaches in the spring, and graze there until winter,
when they collect in little herds, and instinctively return to the piny
woods of the uplands. Messrs. Weeks and Taylor had shot, while on a
four-days' hunt up the White Oak River, twenty deer. Captain H. D.
Heady, of Swansboro, informed me that the ducks and geese he killed in
one winter supplied him with one hundred pounds of selected feathers.
Captain Heady's description of Bogue Inlet was not encouraging for the
future prosperity of this co