round.

"Now," said Pecetti, "you two fire first, and if you don't kill, Weldon
and I will be ready. Aim at the heart."

Morris and I fired, and the panther sprang from the tree among the dogs,
which all piled on him at once. There was a confused mass of fur rolling
on the ground, snarling, and snapping, for half a minute; then the
panther broke loose, and was making off, when Weldon put half a dozen
buckshot in his head, and he rolled over and over, so nearly dead that
when the dogs mounted him again he could do no mischief. He had badly
cut both the deer-hounds, however, which had been the first to seize
him: Weldon's fox-hounds, having more experience with this sort of game,
had kept clear of his claws. It was a fine male, measuring eight feet
from the nose to the tip of the tail, and we took the skin for a trophy.
The tenacity of life in these large cats is very great. One of our balls
had penetrated the chest, and the other had broken the fore leg, but he
was still able to shake off the dogs, and would probably have escaped
but for Weldon's shot....

The next morning, March 13, we breakfasted upon a couple of gophers or
land-tortoises which the men had found the day before in the pine-woods.
These creatures are about eighteen inches long, and weigh twelve or
fifteen pounds. A stew of the gopher and the terminal buds of the
cabbage-palm is a favorite Florida dish. About noon we came suddenly
upon the shore of the great lake Okechobee, which extends away to the
west and south as far as the eye can reach: in fact, the shores are so
low as to be invisible at any distance. This is by far the largest sheet
of water in the State, being about forty miles long and thirty wide, but
it is not deep. It contains on the western side several islands, which
are occupied by the Seminoles. To the south and east of this lake are
the Everglades, or Grassy Lakes, a region where land and water are
mingled,--rivers, lakes, dry islands, and wet marshes all jumbled
together in confusion, and extending over many hundred square miles, the
chosen abode of the alligator, the gar-fish, the snapping-turtle, the
moccasin snake, and other hideous and ferocious creatures more or less
mythical, and recalling those earlier periods in the earth's history
when the great monsters, the Ichthyosauri and the Plesiosauri, wallowed
and crawled over the continents.

We made our camp in a grove near the lake, almost on the spot where
Taylor fought his batt