"After much parleying the doctor's desire for hog and hominy overcame all his fears, and the club marched to breakfast. Here two servant girls armed with long fans, fought a cloud of the famished varmints, while the club swallowed hoe cake covered with a copious lather of the flies of the season. At length our appetites or rather we ourselves, were conquered, and retired in disgust, leaving our foes to bury their dead and divide the spoils of war.
"Our host, who is a true gentleman from Pennsylvania, then ordered the darkies to harness the span. After the inevitable delays which always attend everything that the fifteenth amendments have undertaken to do, we rode out to view the country; and we now congratulated ourselves that our troubles were at an end, but they had but just commenced. Our host had a lame hand, and the professor volunteered to drive; our friends, the varmints, now confined their kind attentions almost exclusively to the horses, which they butchered unmercifully. Oh, such roads! Boys of New England, if you sigh for 'sunny' North Carolina, go; go by all means, and you will return satisfied that old Massachusetts, with all its east winds is a paradise compared with what we saw in the 'old North State,' or in the 'Old Dominion.'
"But to our journey. The horses floundered through quagmires covered in some places with logs, which toss and tumble you till every bone aches, floundered and swam through streams reeking with scum from the cypress swamps; the roads are about six inches wider than your carriage, and the professor found himself obliged to avoid the sharp corners of fences, on either side the deep ditches on whose very edge ran the wheels; to urge his horses over stumps and fallen trees; to whip them over long snouts of prostrate pigs who refused to budge an inch; to jump them over chasms running dark and deep across his path and to spur them down sharp, perpendicular pitches which threatened to break every bone in his body.
"Here and there we saw a few logs piled up together, flanked by mud and sticks, and dignified by the name of house; the naked piccaninnies rolled in the dust, and the poor-white scowled as he lifted his hat, while we worried our miserable way along.
"Now, by the departure of our friend to look after his business, the doctor and the professor were thrown upon their own resources for enjoyment. After shooting at the wild pigs for a while, finding there was great danger of their being melted down into their boots, they threw off their clothes, and regardless of moccasins, regardless of spiders and the whole race of poisonous vermin, they plunged to their necks into the ditch by the roadside. For long weary hours we wallowed till the welcome form of our host appeared, and we recommenced the pitching and stumbling of the dangerous return voyage of this, our pleasure trip.
"For miles the tall, slender pine and cypress-trees festooned with moss and enormous Scuppernong grape-vines, were unbroken by a single clearing or a single shanty. The Scuppernong grapes, by the way, are a great luxury; from these are made a wine equal to anything that can be found (we believe) in the world. One vine is found on Roanoke Island, which is two miles in length, covers several acres of land, and was planted by Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition, centuries ago. For miles that afternoon, we wandered up and down the country seeking for water fit to drink and finding none; looking at the droves of rollicking darkies, making collections of souvenirs, gazing at the good-looking crops of corn, cotton, sweet potatoes, and still fighting the aborigines, the flies.
"We have seen some toothsome things in the South, some beautiful scenes, but at this season of the year, at least, the flies and mosquitoes ruined all as thoroughly as the harpies of olden times defiled the feast of the wandering Trojans.
"The great gala-day of Jamesville has dawned, to-day the great Norfolk steamer honors the town with its presence; everybody (and some more) comes down to the wharf to see the wonderful sight. Here are groups of 'F.F.'s' puffing their long pipes and talking the everlasting 'd—n nigger'; there are crowds of 'fifteenth amendments' laughing and frolicking like children, and here, too, the flea-bitten, mosquito-stabbed, black-fly tortured Doctor B. and Professor F., looking northward as the pilgrim to his loved and far-off Mecca. A scream, a hurrah, a waving of handkerchiefs, and away we go out of the howling wilderness, all that is left of us, and but little indeed that is.
"The Astoria, is but a wretched tub, and we crawl along at the rate of four or five miles per hour, halting here and there to avoid the wrecks of the war, panting for breath, longing, 'as the heart panteth for the water-brook,' to see once more the shores of our beloved New England. Never will this excruciating sail be forgotten. All day—all night, for long, long, weary hours, the wretched little steamer groaned and screamed its melancholy way over the yellow, nasty Roanoke.
"Hour after hour we sat gazing at the tall cypress-trees and the long trailing mosses, looking like the pale sickly shrouds enveloping a dead and ruined world. Here and there we saw huge nests of the size and shape of a barrel, and near, on the ruined branch of a lightning-struck tree, perched on its topmost bough, the great bald eagle of the South, keeping his sleepless watch and ward, while the wife-bird tended the household gods below. Deadly moccasins and huge turtles lay listless in the sun, and hundreds of bushels of blackberries were wasting their sweetness on the desert air. Now and then there came to us like an inspiration from heaven the ecstatic music of the mockingbird, carrying shame and despair to the breasts of all the other warblers of the aerial choir.