iver and its lumber regions with Little River and the sea.

For the first time in my experience as a traveller I had entered a
country where the miles were _short_. When fifteen years old I made my
first journey alone and on foot from the vicinity of Boston to the White
Mountains of New Hampshire. This boyish pedestrian trip occupied about
twenty-one days, and covered some three hundred miles of hard tramping.
New England gives honest measure on the finger-posts along her highways.
The traveller learns by well-earned experience the length of _her_
miles; but in the wilderness of the south there is no standard of five
thousand two hundred and eighty feet to a statute mile, and the watermen
along the sea-coast are ignorant of the fact that one-sixtieth of a
degree of latitude (about six thousand and eighty feet) is the
geographical and nautical mile of the cartographer, as well as the
"knot" of the sailor.

At Piraway Ferry no two of the raftsmen and lumbermen, ignorant or
educated, would give the same distance, either upon the lengths of
surveyed roads or unmeasured rivers. "It is one hundred and sixty-five
miles by river from Piraway Ferry to Conwayborough," said one who had
travelled the route for years. The most moderate estimate made was that
of ninety miles by river. The reader, therefore, must not accuse me of
over-stating distances while absent from the seaboard, as my friends
of the Coast Survey Bureau have not yet penetrated into these interior
regions with their theodolites, plane-tables, and telametre-rods. To the
canoeist, who is ambitious to score up _miles_ instead of collecting
geographical notes, these wild rivers afford an excellent opportunity
to satisfy his aims.

From sixty to eighty miles can be rowed in ten hours as easily as forty
miles can be gone over upon a river of slow current in the northern
states. There is, I am sorry to say, a class of American travellers who
"_do_" all the capitals of Europe in the same business-like way, and if
they have anything to say in regard to every-day life in the countries
through which they pass, they forget to thank the compiler of the
guide-book for the information they possess.

There was but one room in the cabin of my new acquaintance, who
represented that class of piny-woods people called in the south--because
they subsist largely upon corn,--Corn Crackers, or Crackers. These
Crackers are the "poor white folks" of the planter, and "de white trash"
of t