is
present hour that those children had had any experience of water, at least
not washing water, since they first came into the world.

I rowed over to Darien again, to make some purchases, yesterday; and
enquiring the price of various articles, could not but wonder to find
them at least three times as dear as in your northern villages. The
profits of these southern shopkeepers (who, for the most part, are
thoroughbred Yankees, with the true Yankee propensity to trade, no matter
on how dirty a counter, or in what manner of wares) are enormous. The
prices they ask for everything, from coloured calicoes for negro dresses
to pianofortes (one of which, for curiosity sake, I enquired the value
of), are fabulous, and such as none but the laziest and most reckless
people in the world would consent to afford. On our return we found the
water in the cut so extremely low that we were obliged to push the boat
through it, and did not accomplish it without difficulty. The banks of
this canal, when they are thus laid bare, present a singular appearance
enough,--two walls of solid mud, through which matted, twisted, twined,
and tangled, like the natural veins of wood, runs an everlasting net of
indestructible roots, the thousand toes of huge cypress feet. The trees
have been cut down long ago from the soil, but these fangs remain in the
earth without decaying for an incredible space of time. This long
endurance of immersion is one of the valuable properties of these cypress
roots; but though excellent binding stuff for the sides of a canal, they
must be pernicious growth in any land used for cultivation that requires
deep tillage. On entering the Altamaha, we found the tide so low that we
were much obstructed by the sand banks, which, but for their constant
shifting, would presently take entire possession of this noble stream,
and render it utterly impassable from shore to shore, as it already is in
several parts of the channel at certain seasons of the tide. On landing,
I was seized hold of by a hideous old negress, named Sinda, who had come
to pay me a visit, and of whom Mr. ---- told me a strange anecdote. She
passed at one time for a prophetess among her fellow slaves on the
plantation, and had acquired such an ascendancy over them that, having
given out, after the fashion of Mr. Miller, that the world was to come to
an end at a certain time, and that not a very remote one, the belief in
her assertion took such possession of the pe