s as the Constitution of the United States
guarantees to all the states north of Mason and Dixon's line.

From Sloop Landing, on my new friends' plantation, to New Topsail Inlet
I had a brisk row of five miles. Vessels drawing eight feet of water can
reach this landing from the open sea upon a full tide. The sea was
rolling in at this ocean door as my canoe crossed it to the next marsh
thoroughfare, which connected it with Old Topsail Inlet, where the same
monotonous surroundings of sand-hills and marshes are to be found.

The next tidal opening was Rich Inlet, which had a strong ebb running
through it to the sea. From it I threaded the thoroughfares up to the
mainland, reaching at dusk the "Emma Nickson Plantation." The creeks
were growing more shallow, and near the bulkhead, or middle-ground,
where tides from two inlets met, there was so little water and so many
oyster reefs, that, without a chart, the route grew more and more
perplexing in character. It was a distance of thirty miles to Cape Fear,
and twenty miles to New Inlet, which was one of the mouths of Cape Fear
River. From the plantation to New Inlet, the shallow interior sheets of
water with their marshes were called Middle, Masonboro, and Myrtle
sounds. The canoe could have traversed these waters to the end of Myrtle
Sound, which is separated from Cape Fear River by a strip of land only
one mile and a half wide, across which a portage can be made to the
river. Barren and Masonboro are the only inlets which supply the three
little sounds above mentioned with water, after Rich Inlet is passed.

The coast from Cape Fear southward eighty miles, to Georgetown, South
Carolina, has several small inlets through the beach, but there are no
interior waters parallel with the coast in all that distance, which can
be of any service to the canoeist for a coast route. It therefore became
necessary for me to follow the next watercourse that could be utilized
for reaching Winyah Bay, which is the first entrance to the system of
continuous watercourses south of Cape Fear.

The trees of the Nickson Plantation hid the house of the proprietor from
view; but upon beaching my canoe, a drove of hogs greeted me with
friendly grunts, as if the hospitality of their master infected the
drove; and, as it grew dark, they trotted across the field, conducting
me up to the very doors of the planter's home, where Captain Mosely,
late of the Confederate army, gave me a soldier's hearty welc