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We had much the same description of country to pass through as on the previous day mostly open prairie, with pine-barrens and occasional hummocks. I cannot describe each day of our journey. In the early morning we were aroused half an hour before sunrise by a wonderful chorus of birds and insects, the mocking-bird and cat-bird making the greatest noise.
Its farms wasted by the improvidence of the ancien régime, its park and château destroyed by desperate peasantry during the frenzy of '93, there remains nothing now but pine-barrens and furze-patches, with a pile of blackened ruins as a monument of former glory and folly.
We could proceed but slowly after reaching the pine-barrens, the soil of which is loose sand, and at every step the animals we rode sank to the fetlock, which caused them to be greatly fatigued at the close of the day. At night-fall, after selecting our ground adjacent to a river, we pitched our tent, and supper was prepared.
Here again we are reminded of the Spaniards under Narvaez and Soto, who struggled through the swamps and interminable pine-barrens of Florida, cheered on by the delusive assurance that when they came to the country of Appalachee they would find gold in abundance. Another class of malcontents took matters into their own hands.
The dreary pine-barrens and sand-hills are slightly undulating, and are here and there thickly matted with palmetto. In pursuance of my original design, I had now to penetrate nearly a hundred miles into the interior; and, as the Indians and fugitive negroes were scouring that part of the country in hostile bands, I contemplated this part of my route with no little anxiety.
At the nearest gray outpost, in a sudden shower of the first true news for a week the Mississippi crossed, Grant victorious at Port Gibson and joined by Sherman at Grand Gulf Flora learned, to her further joy, that the Callenders, misled by report that Brodnax's brigade was at Mobile, had gone eastward, as straight away from Brodnax and the battery as Gulf-shore roads could take them, across a hundred-mile stretch of townless pine-barrens with neither railway nor telegraph.
The Natchez-Vicksburg district became largely consolidated into great plantations, and the tract extending thence to Tuscaloosa, as likewise the district about Montgomery, Alabama, became occupied mostly by smaller plantations on a scale of a dozen or two slaves each, while the non-slaveholders drifted to the southward pine-barrens or the western or northwestern frontiers.
Gates at length emerged from the inhospitable region of pine-barrens, sand hills, and swamps, and, after having effected a junction with General Caswell, at the head of the militia of North Carolina, and a small body of troops under Lieutenant-Colonel Porterfield, he arrived at Clermont, or Rugely's Mills, on the 13th of August , and next day was joined by the militia of Virginia, amounting to 700 men, under General Stevens.
Though swamps and fens stretched in all directions as far as the eye could reach, the landscape was more grateful to the eye than the famine-stricken, pine-barrens of Georgia, which had become wearisome to the sight.
In our Southern States there are thin forests, called pine-barrens, through which one can travel for miles on horseback. The white pine is easily distinguished by its leaves being in fives, by its very long cones, composed of loosely-arranged scales, and when young by the smoothness and delicate light-green color of the bark.
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