ineapple before an Irish hedger and
ditcher.

The white mullet, shad, and perch of the Altamaha are the most excellent
animals that ever went in water. At St. Simon's the water is entirely
salt, and often very rough, as it is but a mile and a half from the open
sea, and the river there is in fact a mere arm of salt water. It is
hardly possible ever to fish like a lady, with a float, in it; but the
negroes bait a long rope with clams, shrimps, and oysters, and sinking
their line with a heavy lead, catch very large mullet, fine whitings,
and a species of marine monster, first cousin once removed to the great
leviathan, called the drum, which, being stewed _long enough_ (that is,
nobody can tell how long) with a precious French sauce, might turn out a
little softer than the nether millstone, and so perhaps edible: _mais
avec cette sauce la on mangerait son pere_, and perhaps without the
family indigestion that lasted the Atridae so long.

One of these creatures was sent to me by one of our neighbors as a
curiosity; it was upwards of four feet long, weighed over twenty pounds,
and had an enormous head. I wouldn't have eaten a bit of it for the
world!

The waters all round St. Simon's abound in capital fish; beds of
oysters, that must be inexhaustible I should think, run all along the
coast; shrimps and extraordinarily large prawns are taken in the
greatest abundance, and good green turtle, it is said, is easily
procured at a short distance from these shores.

You ask what sort of house we had down there. Why, truly, wretched
enough. There were on the two plantations no fewer than _eight_ dwelling
houses, all in different states and stages of uninhabitableness, half of
them not being quite built up, and the other half not quite fallen down.

The grandfather of the present proprietor built a good house on the
island of St. Simon's, in a beautiful situation on a point of land where
two rivers meet--rather, two large streams of salt water, fine,
sparkling, billowy sea rivers. Before the house was a grove of large
orange-trees, and behind it an extensive tract of down, covered with
that peculiar close, short turf which creates South Down and Pre Sale
mutton: and overshadowed by some magnificent live-oaks and white
mulberry-trees. By degrees, however, the tide, which rises to a great
height here, running very strongly up both these channels, has worn away
the bank, till tree by tree the orange grove has been entirely washed