'Sandy, call the dog in; the horses won't 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 mimosa, and the persimmon, gayly 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 heroes the world has worshiped.
The woods were free from underbrush, but 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 burs of the pine.
We passed great numbers of swine, feeding on these burs, 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 a 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.
'Race-horses! Why, are they fleet of foot?'
'Fleet as deer. I'd match one against an ordinary horse at any time.'
'Come, my friend, you're practicing on my ignorance of natural history.'
'Not a bit of it. See! there's a good specimen yonder. If we can get him into the road, and fairly started, I'll bet you a dollar he'll beat Sandy's mare on a half-mile stretch—Sandy to hold the stakes and have the winnings.'