ty miles in three hours, but the credit of this quick
time must be given to the rapid current. My host did not seem well
pleased with the solitude imposed upon him. His employers had sent him
from Wilmington, to hold and protect "their turpentine farm," which was
a wilderness of trees covering four thousand acres, and was valued, with
its distillery, at five thousand dollars. An old negro, who attended the
still and cooked the meals, was his only companion.

We had finished our frugal repast, when a man, shouting in the darkness,
approached the house on horseback. This individual, though very tipsy,
represented Law and Order in that district, as I was informed when "Jim
Gore," a justice of the peace, saluted me in a boisterous manner.
Seating himself by the fire, he earnestly inquired for the bottle. His
stomach, he said, was as dry as a lime-kiln, and, though water answers
to slake lime, he demanded something stronger to slake the fire that
burned within him. He was very suspicious of me when Hall told him of my
canoe journey. After eying me from head to toe in as steady a manner as
he was capable of, he broke forth with: "Now, stranger, this won't do.
What are ye a-travelling in this sort of way for, in a paper dug-out?"

I pleaded a strong desire to study geography, but the wise fellow
replied:

"Geography! geography! Why, the fellers who rite geography never travel;
they stay at home and spin their yarns 'bout things they never sees."
Then, glancing at his poor butternut coat and pantaloons, he felt my
blue woollen suit, and continued, in a slow, husky voice: "Stranger,
them clothes cost _something_; they be _store_-clothes. That paper
dug-out _cost money_, I tell ye; and it _costs_ something to travel
the hull length of the land. No, stranger; if ye be not on a bet, then
somebody's a-paying ye _well_ for it."

For an hour I entertained this roughest of law dignitaries with an
account of my long row, its trials and its pleasures. He became
interested in the story, and finally related to me his own aspirations,
and the difficulties attending his efforts to make the piny-woods people
respect the laws and good government. He then described the river route
through the swamps to the sea, and, putting his arm around me in the
most affectionate manner, he mournfully said:

"O stranger, my heart is with ye; but O, how ye will have to
take it when ye go past those awful wretches to-morrow; how they
will give