Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/420

Rh cut in the interior. The mule goes securely on the "gum road," and the negro driver usually walks ahead on one of the broad rails.

There was no one at Roper's saw-mill who could give us any information, so we paddled on to the village of Deep Creek, before reaching which we passed through another lock. Here the Dismal Swamp proper may be said to begin. At this lock we were again raised several feet, so that we were now, although only a few miles from tidal-water, probably sixteen feet above the sea level.

"Shall we pay toll here?" we asked the lockman.

"Not till you come out," he answered, making it clear that there was only one entrance and exit on this side of the Dismal Swamp.

"Does the swamp begin here?"

"Yes," said the lockman, leaning at an angle of forty degrees, and slowly pushing the great beam with his back. "It begins here, and it runs all the way to Florida."

This was true, in a way. The whole southern coast is margined by swamp lands; but the Dismal Swamp is not of them. It is high land instead of low land; its water is fresh, instead of salt or brackish. Among swamps it is an abnormality. It leans over the sea, and yet contains its own