Candor obliges me to say that although we saw scuppernong vines in abundance, we never saw any snakes on them, black or of any other color; but once in driving home from the Point in the cool of a very cool evening we saw a captive rattlesnake held in leash by the man who had caught it. The loathly worm was quite torpid from the cold, and lay a gray, clayey length that showed the whole pattern of its checkered design, with its rattles a full yard away from its deadly fangs. We did not stay to ask how or where it had been taken, but hurried by through the early dusk which the Southern twilight had suddenly lapsed into after our visit to the vineyard where a German family makes a “fine, fruity old port” from the berries of the scuppernong. These grow, anomalously enough, the size of small plums, in loose clusters of three or four, and are of the flavor of our Concord grapes, but do not transport so well as the wine, and probably would not ripen in the North. The name had always a charm for me from its musical enumeration in that pleasant rhyme of Longfellow’s renowning our Catawba beyond all other native, and some alien vintages; and I now satisfied my wish to see the scuppernong growing on some spreading trellises which it roofed. But it has never the soft insinuation of vines better known to literature, and before the leaves come to hide them in the spring, it is covered with spiky twigs instead of the delicate, clinging tendrils of other grapes. The spreading trellises here were of no great spread, and were presently lost in an orchard of oranges and other fruit trees, all ordered with a neatness very alien to the sloven farming of the country about, but much in keeping with the young Bavarian sisters, with their long braids and smooth masses of dark hair, who came out to show us the place. They came out of a new-built house of Northern pattern--first to save us from the misgivings of their dogs; and last--their widowed mother and older sister being in town--the capable little women led us to the barn where the bottles and barrels of the scuppernong were stored. When I proposed to buy a bottle of the wine, they wished me to taste a glass of it that I might test its quality; and they even allowed our colored driver (a very mildly coffee-colored driver) to join in the test, so that he was able to add his voice in favor of the vintage from a whole tumblerful.