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Built upon a narrow neck of land, which is confined on one side by the river, and on the other by impassable morasses, its means of defence require little explanation; and as these morasses extend to the distance of only a few miles, and are succeeded by Lake Pontchartrain, which again communicates through Lake Borgne* with the sea, its peculiar commercial advantages must be equally apparent.
I see Moses ben Amram, with his measuring-chain and his graving-tools, marking on those stone tables of his the deepest abysses and the muddiest morasses. When I kept swine with the Hegelians, I used to say, or rather, I still say, for, alas!
If one gazed toward the east, or south, or west, then there was hardly anything to be seen but a poor highland with dark spruce-trees, brown morasses, ice-clad lakes, and bluish mountain-ridges. The boy couldn't keep from thinking it was true that the one who had created this hadn't taken very great pains with his work, but had thrown it together in a hurry.
Riding, driving, or tramping on, now through stately groves, now over prairies which lose themselves in the horizon, now fording shallow streams, or poling themselves on rafts across rivers, skirting morasses or wallowing through them, and climbing mountains, as they breathe the fresh woodland air and catch glimpses of a thousand novel scenes and encounter the dangers or endure the hardships of this first stage in their pilgrimage, they learn those first hard lessons which stand them in such good stead when they have settled in their permanent abodes in the heart of the wilderness which it is the work of the pioneer to subdue.
Tyers had been for many years a naval instructor on board a man-of-war, understood navigation and surveying, and, it is to be presumed, knew the distance he had travelled and the course to be followed in returning to Port Philip; but there were valleys filled with impenetrable scrub, creeks often too deep to ford, and boundless morasses, so that the journey was made crooked with continual deviations.
The peculiarities of the spot derived their character from the morasses and the woods, and the courses of the sluggish streams in the neighborhood, and these are elements of landscape scenery which ten centuries of time and of cultivation would entirely change.
After the battle of Cannæ the character of the war changes. Hitherto Hannibal had swept everything before him. Rivers and mountains and morasses had been powerless to thwart his progress. Army after army, vastly superior in numbers and composed of the best fighting men the ancient world ever saw, had come against him to be broken, scattered, and destroyed.
The universal face was clothed with living green. And every part was fertile as well as beautiful. It was no where deformed by rough or ragged rocks: it did not shock the view with horrid precipices, huge chasms, or dreary caverns: with deep, impassable morasses, or deserts of barren sands.
For a time the path ascends, for the inn is not at the summit of the pass. Until it attains the summit it leads through a region of hills and ravines, with swamps, morasses, precipices of rocks, and great patches of snow scattered here and there along the way. At one place Rollo met with an adventure which for a moment put him in considerable danger.
This detachment was to penetrate Canada about ninety or one hundred miles below Montreal, proceeding by the Kennebec river, and thence through the wilderness between the St. Lawrence and the settled parts of Maine. In this route, precipitous mountains, deep and almost impenetrable swamps and morasses, were to be passed.
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