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Only the wild turkey in the pinetree's top is a mark for the rifle; or the pheasant, darting up out of the path into the overhanging branches, tempts occasionally the sharpshooter; while, on the contrary, woodcock and snipe bore for worms in every marsh and mud-bank, undisturbed by setter or by pointer. The wild boar hunt is the chief sport in Circassian venery.
Great stretches of mud-bank are visible in many places at low tide, varied by occasional clumps of mangrove, and by oyster-covered rocks. The land on either side is mostly of very poor quality, though a good deal of it has been taken up. Here and there, we pass in sight of some homestead; a white verandah-ed wooden house, surrounded by its gardens, orchards, paddocks, and fields.
But it is of Venice that I would speak. The folk there live like water-rats upon a mud-bank, but the houses are very fine, and the churches, especially that of St. Mark, are as great as any I have seen. But above all they are proud of their statues and their pictures, which are the most famous in Europe.
Her motherly feelings had made her willing to take her son to some hiding-place in Europe; but since that could not be, and perhaps was not best, she had thoroughly settled it in her mind that he should accept of her offer and live at her expense the undemonstrative life of an oyster in the social and moral ooze of the obscurest mud-bank he could find.
I lay my pencil aside for a minute or two to catch what he is saying, and when I have got the hang of the story I don't wonder he feels as mad as a wooden-legged man on a wet mud-bank. He had been out all day since the very break of dawn with a couple of scouts, searching the kopjes for a notorious Boer spy, whose cleverness and audacity had made him a thorn in our side.
Then to my surprise the men suddenly changed paddles for poles and turning the bows inshore poled right on up over the mud-bank. It was such a funny and novel performance that it snapped the spell for me, and I joined with the men in their shouts of laughter over the antics of the canoe on the slippery mud-bank.
The passengers in wet mackintoshes, and the seamen in wet tarpaulins; Gravesend, with its dirty side to the river, and its dreary mud-bank exposed to sight; the alternate drizzle and down-pour; the muddle and confusion of the deck; all this presented anything but an agreeable picture to look at.
However, it seemed that they had done so, as the boat took the ground on a mud-bank, and stuck fast. Her brother was unable to push off, and asked her to help, so she stood up and, with the other oar, moved to assist him.
The Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of the Chicago lies bleaching; but we are not so sure that they did not ground themselves fast upon the equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the opposite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they were so precisely frank as to arouse indignation; at Philadelphia they are so careful of generalities that they make us doubtful, if not suspicious.
Then a storm supervened, which swept away the paddle-boxes and stove in the life-boats, and they seem to have been in real peril. Next the ship struck on a mud-bank. But dangers and discomforts must have been forgotten, at any rate to begin with, in the glories of the reception that awaited the "inimitable," as Dickens whimsically called himself in those days, when he landed in the New World.
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