r reasons. The attention of cows claims
our assistance this evening.

"Unalterably yours."

The following is probably the longest sentence ever written, containing,
as it does, eight hundred words:

"I propose, then, to give your readers some description of this old yet
still strange and wild country, that has been settled for three hundred
years, and is not yet inhabited--a land of shifting sand and deep mud--a
land of noble rivers that rise in swamps and consist merely of chains of
shallow lakes, some of them twenty miles long and two miles across, and
only twelve feet deep--of wide, sandy plains, covered with
solemn-sounding pines--of spots so barren that nothing can be made to
grow upon them, and yet with a soil so fertile that if you tickle it
with a hoe, it will laugh out an abundant harvest of sugar, cotton, and
fruit--a land of oranges, lemons, pomegranates, pineapples, figs, and
bananas; whose rivers teem with fish, its forests with game, and its
very air with fowl; where everything will grow except apples and wheat;
where everything can be found except ice; yet where the people, with a
productive soil, a mild climate and beautiful nature, affording every
table luxury, live on corn-grist, sweet potatoes, and molasses; where
men possessing forty thousand head of cattle never saw a glass of milk
in their lives, using the imported article when used at all, and then
calling it consecrated milk; where the very effort to milk a cow would
probably scare her to death, as well as frighten a whole neighborhood by
the unheard of phenomenon; where cabbages grow on the tops of trees, and
you may dig bread out of the ground; where, below the frost-line, the
castor-oil plant becomes a large tree of several years' growth, and a
pumpkin or bean-vine will take root from its trailing branches, and thus
spread and live year after year; where cattle do not know what hay is,
and refuse it when offered, so that the purchase of a yoke of oxen is
not considered valid if the animals will not eat in a stable; and where
in the mild winter, when the land grass is dried up, horses and cattle
may be seen wading and swimming in the ponds and streams, plunging their
heads under water grasses and moss; where many lakes have holes in the
bottom and underground communication, so that they will sometimes shrink
away to a mere cupful, leaving many square miles of surface uncovered,
and then again fill up from below and spread out over their for