among the stubbly stalks are young
rice-plants to be cut off by frost. Those dams
are the self-regulating dams that check the
irrigation of the swampy fields, whose
malaria white men can brave in winter only. It
is the necessity of perpetually sluicing these
rice-fields and laying them for days under water,
that makes these rice districts of Carolina
specially deadly to the European: so deadly,
that every bale of Carolina rice may be said to
cost a human life.

Fifteen days after sowing, these fields are
laid under water, and again when the beautiful
bunches of snowy nutritious seed are all but
ripe; also, I believe, during some intermediate
state as well. The great dread of the rice-planter
is the rice-bird; just as the crop is ripe,
these birds come in enormous flocks. The bird
is a little bird with brown body and yellow
wings, and, when the rice is over, goes to
the north, just in time for the fruit season.
Now, the captain explains to me that rice-land
is very valuable, as it is only certain level
tracts near rivers that are fit for the purpose of
growing rice. That land there, mere ooze, half
water and half mud, could be reclaimed into
rice-land, though now it is all over wild oats
and reeds; but it must be sufficiently drained,
so that the negroes can leave it clear and warm
at certain stages of ripening. That sloping land
in the distance, up towards the pine-woods,
would never grow rice. It is too far off for
irrigation.

Here on the Savannah river, as often in
Charleston afterwards, I take pains to ascertain
the truth of the common Southern assertion, that
white labour could not be used in the feverish
rice-grounds. Irishmen have not been tried at it,
but they have been tried in the equally dangerous
irrigation of marshy lands on the banks of the
Mississippi. There, fired with bad whisky, these
reckless, hardy sons of toil work in gangs under
a burning sun which even a negro at noon-day
cannot and is not allowed to face, engaged in
piling up those huge ramparts or levees, as
the Southerners call them, which each district
along the river is obliged to keep in repair,
to save the whole country round from
perpetual floods. "Why do they not employ the
slaves?"

My dear friend, for this simple and intelligible
reason: Slaves are too valuable to be employed in
such dangerous labour.

But I must away with speed. Imagine me,
then, a day or two after this, on a Carolina railway,
racing on to Charleston, through leagues of
aromatic pine-woods. A planter sitting next to
me has been telling me, with infinite quaintness,
quite unconscious of the cruelty that coloured the
story, of a fat dropsical nigger he once hired, who
would sleep all day, and used to torment his
overseer by talking in an absurd way about
dying of fever. "Waal, what did the overseer,
who was a cute man, do, but go and buy a bundle
of green cow-hides, and every day for a fortnight
that overseer made that dropsical nigger walk
round the shed where the cotton-press was kept,
he welting him all the time with the cow-hide.
But such was the 'tarnal obstinacy of that
dropsical nigger, that, would I believe it, he would
not get well, and had eventually to be sent
home? Oh, those niggers! they are the
pig-headedest critturs in the world."

More pines— a coppery red on their scaly
serpent-like trunks— their foliage dark and saturnine;
no birds sing among their branches, but at
their feet red bramble-stalks, arching and stunted
crimson undergrowth of maple and glossy arbutus.
At every station are great sacrificial altars of
split pine-logs, distilling resin; and as we stop
to take in fuel I hear the chump and clump of
the logs as they are thrown into the fireman's
tender. Everywhere rise delicious breathings
of aroma from pine-woods, till I begin almost
to believe with Bacon and the empirical doctors
that "such resinous smells do specially fortify
the brain, and recruit the wasted spirits;"
all resinous smells, from pitch and turpentine,
being peculiarly grateful to me. The fragrance
reminds me, too, of the woods about the
mountains that wall in Attica; for, by that old trick
of the mind, the past seems always to me to
have been golden, and the present to be lead:
such a strange alchemist is Memory.

But now I find more attractive metal than
the quaintly cruel planter, in a pretty Baltimore
girl (the Baltimore women are the wonders
of America), who, artless and unaffected
as Imogene or Miranda, is playing with a
pretty grey squirrel she has tamed, and which
now leaps and glides all over the long railway
carriage, to everybody's amusement and
my special delight. It flies over the backs of
our seats, skims down the centre way, sidles
under my arm, nibbles at a bit of "corn dodger"
some one throws him, but always, sooner or later,
with little staring timid eye, with bushing tail
and pretty supplicative paws, hurries back, and
slips quietly into his mistress's pocket, out of
which every now and then his inquiring head and
bright beady eyes peer out.

Let us leave the seaboard, and pass to the
high sandy bluffs that further northward give
way to mountain ledges, granite crags, and the
splashing silver of such falls as those of Slicking.
There, listening to stories of Indian chiefs and
revolutionary combats, you may, from some
rocky nest high up near the eagle, look down
on sweet little coves of greensward, patches
of maize, and rude log-cabins. But it is
in such scenery as you find in the lowland of
Carolina, round Midwarry, that the roaming
Englishman specially delights. There, you can
find pine-woods, every third tree gashed and
scarred to bleed out its turpentine, and further
on, the huge bald cypress; with its boughs
hung with beards of the grey dead-looking
Spanish moss; there, bushes of the laurel,
green and glittering in the sun, with
spearheaded leaves. Here, too, are the fragrant
bay-tree and the murderous ivy; here, amid this
tropical vegetation, which in summer breathes
deadly airs fatal to all but negroes, who alone
remain all the year among it. The live oak