With this affectionate farewell, he turned his horse and led the way up the road.
The dog, who was a short distance in advance, soon gave a piercing howl, and started off at the speed of a reindeer. He had struck the trail, and urging our horses to their fastest speed, we followed.
We were all well mounted, but the mare the Colonel had given me was a magnificent animal, as fleet as the wind, and with a gait so easy that her back seemed a rocking-chair. Saddle-horses at the South are trained to the gallop—Southern riders not deeming it necessary that one's breakfast should be churned into a Dutch cheese by a trotting nag, in order that he may pass for a horseman.
We had ridden on at a perfect break-neck pace for half an hour, when the Colonel shouted to our companion:
"Sandy, call the dog in; the horses wont last ten miles at this gait—we've a long ride before us."
The dirt-eater did as he was bidden, and we soon settled into a gentle gallop.
We had passed through a dense forest of pines, but were emerging into a "bottom country," where some of the finest deciduous trees—then brown and leafless, but bearing promise of the opening beauty of spring—reared, along with the unfading evergreen, their tall stems in the air. The live-oak, the sycamore, the Spanish mulberry, the holly, and the persimmon—gaily festooned with wreaths of the white and yellow jessamine, the woodbine and the cypress-moss, and bearing here and there a bouquet of the mistletoe, with its deep green and glossy leaves upturned to the sun—flung their broad arms over the road, forming an archway grander and more beautiful than any the hand of man ever wove for the greatest hero the world has worshipped.
The woods were free from underbrush, and a coarse, wiry grass, unfit for fodder, and scattered through them in detached patches, was the only vegetation visible. The ground was mainly covered with the leaves and burrs of the pine.
We passed great numbers of swine, feeding on these burrs, and now and then a horned animal browsing on the cypress-moss where it hung low on the trees. I observed that nearly all the swine were marked, though they seemed too wild to have ever seen an owner, or a human habitation. They were a long, lean, slab-sided race, with legs and shoulders like deer, and bearing no sort of resemblance to the ordinary hog, except in the snout, and that feature was so much longer and sharper than the nose of the Northern swine, that I doubt if Agassiz would class the two as one species. However, they have their uses—they make excellent bacon, and are "death on snakes." Ireland itself is not more free from the serpentine race than are the districts frequented by these long-nosed quadrupeds.
"We call them Carolina race-horses," said the Colonel, as he finished an account of their peculiarities.