nd
listened to the story of my cruise. I doctored the sick pickaninny of my
host, and made the family a pot of strong coffee. This negro could read,
but he asked me to address a label he wished to attach to a bag of
Sea-Island cotton of one hundred and sixty pounds' weight, which he had
raised, and was to ship by the steamboat Lizzie Baker to a mercantile
house in Savannah.

As I rested upon my blankets, which were spread upon the floor of the
only comfortable room in the house, at intervals during the night the
large form of the black stole softly in and bent over me to see if I
were well covered up, and he as noiselessly piled live-oak sticks upon
the dying embers to dry up the dampness which rose from the river.

He brought me a basin of cold water in the morning, and not possessing a
towel clean enough for a white man, he insisted that I should use his
wife's newly starched calico apron to wipe my face and hands upon. When
I offered him money for the night's accommodation and the excellent
oyster breakfast that his wife prepared for me, he said: "You may gib my
wife whateber pleases you for _her cooking_, but nuffin for de food or
de lodgings. I'se no nigger, ef I is a cullud man."

It was now Saturday, and as I rowed through the marsh thoroughfare
called New Tea Kettle Creek, which connects Mud River with Doboy Sound
near the southern end of Sapelo Island, I calculated the chances of
finding a resting-place for Sunday. If I went up to the mainland
through North and Darien rivers to the town of Darien, my past
experience taught me that instead of enjoying rest I would become a
forced exhibiter of the paper canoe to crowds of people. To avoid this,
I determined to pass the day in the first hammock that would afford
shelter and fire-wood; but as the canoe entered Doboy Sound, which, with
its inlet, separates Sapelo from the almost treeless Wolf Island, the
wind rose with such violence that I was driven to take refuge upon Doboy
Island, a small marshy territory, the few firm acres of which were
occupied by the settlement and steam saw-mill of Messrs. Hiltons, Foster
& Gibson, a northern lumber firm.

Foreign and American vessels were anchored under the lee of protecting
marshes, awaiting their cargoes of sawed deals and hewn timber; while
rafts of logs, which had been borne upon the currents of the Altamaha
and other streams from the far interior regions of pine forests, were
collected here and manufactured into lu