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Updated: June 6, 2025
While I still stood on the brow of the hill, my young head filled with these musings, and my heart weighed down almost to crushing by the sense of vast loneliness and peril which the spectacle of naked marsh-lands and dark, threatening forests inspired, the sound of the chopping ceased, and there followed, a few seconds later, a great swish and crash down the hill.
I would here ask if he can calculate what time it may have required to hollow out the bed of the Elbe from its source to the sea; and to tell how often the marsh-lands, which he now sees cultivated, had been formed and destroyed by the river before they were cultivated in their present state; or if there is any security that they shall not again be taken away by the river, and again formed in the same place.
The air was warm, and sweet with the smell of bayberry-bushes and pitch-pines and the delicious saltness of the sea, which was not far from us all the way. It was a perfect autumn day. Sometimes we crossed pebble beaches, and then went farther inland, through woods and up and down steep little hills; over shaky bridges which crossed narrow salt creeks in the marsh-lands.
In an age when learning was confined to the few, they were not more illiterate than the corresponding class in other countries. 'In the summer the men were continually employed in husbandry. They cultivated chiefly the rich marsh-lands by the rivers and the sea, building dikes along the banks and shores to shut out the tides; and made little effort to clear the woodlands.
At this hour the sky was often as pink as the almond orchards, melting above into a blue light but intense; while everything in its glow, the tall trees on the distant mountains, and the picturesque irregularities of the marsh-lands, seemed to lift up their heads and drink in the beauty until Isabel expected to see them reel.
Now, I am not prepared to give the derivation of the word "gowt," but I can describe what it is namely, the termination, at the sea-coast, of the long Lincolnshire land-drains, in the shape of a lock with gates, which are opened at certain times, to allow the drainage to flow under the sand into the sea, but carefully closed when the tide is up, to prevent flooding of the marsh-lands, protected by the high sea-bank, which runs along the coast and acts the part of cliffs.
Finally, below New Orleans, growing more sluggish, and dividing into several mouths, or "passes," it wanders through tracts of waste marsh-lands into the gulf, which it colors brown for miles around.
Panting, screaming, scraping her bottom over the sand-bars, all day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue open water below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset.
The means of propelling a boat against such disadvantages, to which the Marquis of Worcester alludes, was in all probability by steam-power. This was a water-engine for drying marsh-lands and mines, requiring neither pump, suckers, barrels, bellows, nor external nor additional help, save that afforded from its own operations.
From his position he looked across the courtyard toward the garden where stiff cypress-trees stood sentry among the mignonette and the roses, now in the full glory of their autumn bloom. Beyond the garden, the rough outline of the walls cut a straight line across the distant plains, which melted away into the haze of the marsh-lands by the banks of the Gironde far to the westward.
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