Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/183

 pines, rise like slender columns, and are crowned with a tuft of [sic]knarly limbs and long, bristly leaves, through which the breezes murmur with a monotonous sound, much like that of falling waters, or waves breaking on a beach. There is rarely any undergrowth, and the surface is either matted with the saw-palmetto, a low ever-green, or covered with a coarse and scattered grass, on which herds of half-wild cattle feed in summer, and starve in winter. The trunks of the pines scarcely interrupt a prospect, whose tedious sameness is only varied by tracts, here and there, of almost impenetrable swamp, thickly grown up with bays, water oaks, cypresses and other large trees, adown whose spreading branches and whitened trunks, a long dusky moss hangs in melancholy festoons, drooping to the ground, the very drapery of disease and death. The rivers, which are wide and shallow, swollen with the heavy rains of spring and winter, frequently overflow their low and marshy banks, and help to increase the extent of swampy ground, — the copious source of poisonous vapors and febrile exhalations. Even where the country begins to rise into hills, it preserves, fora long distance, its sterile character. It is a collection of sandy hillocks thrown together in the strangest confusion. In several places, not even the pine will grow; and the barren and thirsty soil, is clothed only with stunted bushes of the black jack, or dwarf oak. In some spots even these are wanting; and the bare sand is drifted by the winds.

Throughout this extent of country, of which, with all its barrenness, a great part might be, and. by the enterprising spirit of free labor doubtless would be, brought into profitable cultivation, there are only some small tracts, principally along the water courses, which the costly and thriftless system of slave labor has found capable of improvement. All the rest still remains a primitive wilderness, with scarcely any thing to interrupt its desolate and dreary monotony.

This description does not include the tract stretching along the sea-shore, from the mouth of the Santee to that of the Savannah, and extending in some places, twenty or thirty miles up the country. The coast between these rivers, is a series of islands; — the famous sea-islands of the