Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/508

Rh to bathe in water in which it hangs will blister and corrupt the flesh. This is Moore's " deadly vine," that

"There are two things I should like to know," said Moseley, during our last day on the lake," and one is what that fellow in the Norfolk tug meant by advising us to keep our pistols handy? Surely there could be no men more good-natured and lawful than these poor fellows who work in the swamp."

This was emphatically true. Considering the wild life the "swampers" lead, they are the most harmless, amiable, and, I should say, innocent men I have ever met. Their conversation with us and among themselves was about as light, cheerful, and curious as that of children. They carry no weapons; they are sober, play-loving, and obliging. Only on one colored man in the swamp did we see anything like a weapon, and that was a razor, ostentatiously carried in his waistcoat pocket by a jaunty mulatto; but he had been a great traveller, he said, and he had only come into the swamp to see some friend among the juniper-cutters, though perhaps he had some other reason for a