"You will hurry on," said the old man, with a laugh; and at the same time, springing forward, he caught me by the hair. "Take warning for the future," added he, as he helped me out of the mud; "and look there!"

I did look, and saw half a dozen alligators writhing and crawling in the noxious slime within a few feet of us. I felt a sickening sensation, and for a moment I could not utter a word; the Yankee produced his whiskey flask.

"Take a swallow of this," said he; "but no, better wait till we are out of the swamp. Stop a little till your heart beats quieter. So, you are better now. When you've made two or three such journeys with old Nathan, you'll be quite another man. Now,-forward again."

A few minutes later we were out of the swamp, and looking over a field of palmettos that waved and rustled in the moonbeams. The air was fresh, and once more we breathed freely.

"Now then," said our guide, "a dram, and then in half an hour we are at the Salt Lick."

"Where ?" asked I.

"At the Salt Lick, to shoot a deer or two for supper. Hallo! what is that ?"

"A thunderclap."

"A thunderclap! You have heard but few of them in Louisiana, I guess, or you would know the difference betwixt thunder and the crack of a back-woodsman's rifle. To be sure, yonder oak wood has an almighty echo. That's James's rifle he has shot a stag. There's another shot."

This time it was evidently a rifle shot, but re-echoed like thunder from the depths of the immense forest.

"We must let them know that we're still in whole skins, and not in the maw of an alligator," said the old man, who had been loading his rifle, and now fired it off.

In half an hour we were at the Salt Lick, where we found our guide's two sons busy disembowelling and cutting up a fine buck they had just killed, an occupation in which they were so engrossed that they scarce seemed to notice our arrival. We sat down, not a little glad to repose after the fatigues and dangers we had gone through. When hind and fore quarters, breast and back, were all divided in right huntsmanlike style, the young men looked at their father. "Will you take a bite and sup here ?" said the latter, addressing Carleton and myself, "or will you wait till we get home ?"

"How far is there still to go?"

"How far? With a good trotting horse, and a better road, three quarters of an hour would bring you there. You may reckon it a couple of hours."

"Then we would prefer eating something here."

"As you will."

Without more words, or loss of time, a haunch was cut off one of the hind quarters; dry leaves and branches were collected; and in one minute a fire was blazing brightly, the joint turning before it on a wooden spit. In half an hour the party was collected round a roast haunch of venison, which, although eaten without bread or any of the usual condiments, certainly appeared to us to be the very best we had ever tasted.

XVII.

A PIC-NIC AT THE SEA-SHORE.

"The heart, distrusting, asks if this be joy."-Goldsmith.

THE Americans are certainly a gregarious people. What else but an inherent propensity can excite that passion for congregating en masse, which seems to pervade all classes of my countrymen whenever the almost tropical heats of our summers make nothing more desirable than to have "ample room and verge enough?"

As soon as the thermometer begins to range between 80° and 100°, the whole population becomes possessed with the idea that there is no breathing except in the atmosphere of a dense crowd; and away they all go in stages, crammed to the utmost that the law allows, and in steamboats noted for never

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carrying less than four hundred passengers, to enjoy the delights of hotels and boardinghouses filled to overflowing, at places celebrated for mineral-springs or sea-bathing.

I decided, at any early age, that springs were not to my taste. I had never been in any need of the benefits supposed to be derived from drinking chalybeate waters; and I thought there was nothing, at those places, sufficiently interesting or amusing to atone for the discomforts of small, close sleeping-rooms, crowded tables, and the necessity of appearing always in grand costume: the last grievance no trifling one in warm weather, or indeed in any weather at all. But I wavered some time before I settled into the same opinion with regard to the sea-shore locations, all of which have a redeeming quality in the grandeur of the vast and magnificent ocean, with all its associations and accompaniments.

Still, the stories I heard every summer of the overflow of company, and the consequent inconveniences at the fashionable bathingplaces, frightened from me all inclination to participate in the inflictions necessary to be borne by the sufferers that compose these crowds; particularly when I was told that many, on arriving at night, could not on any