Page:A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf.djvu/155

Rh of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.

I think that most of the antipathies which haunt and terrify us are morbid productions of ignorance and weakness. I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I have seen them at home. Honorable representatives of the great saurians of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty!

Found a beautiful lycopodium to-day, and many grasses in the dry sunlit places called "barrens," "hummocks," "savannas," etc. Ferns also are abundant. What a flood of heat and light is daily poured out on these beautiful openings and intertangled woods! "The land of the sunny South," we say, but no part of our diversified country is more shaded and covered from sunshine. Many a sunny sheet of plain and prairie break the continuity of the forests of the North and West, and the forests themselves are mostly lighted also,