With much tumbling, and clutching their brood together, they scrambled into their appointed places, in a seedy-looking car adjoining ours, and we are off; the city spires and steeples fade from our view, and our faces are set towards Georgia. We are well beyond the region of the maple trees now; but forests of pine and cypress, dashed here and there with the snow-white blossoms of the dogwood, close on all sides of us, except where our narrow iron path makes its way through them. Soon we come to an open clearing, where the forest trees have been cut down and timber huts built up; this is a wood station, and mountains of logs are piled on each side. Here we stop to feed our engine, while a diversified company of wild hogs--gaunt, lean, hungry-looking creatures, all legs and heads, like swinish tramps who get their living in the woods--gather and grunt in herds almost under our car wheels, and goats with large families of youthful nannies and billies stand staring mildly in the background, now and then playfully butting one another. We are soon off again; racks of wood are stationed at certain distances all along the line, coal being scarce in these localities, and wood much lighter of digestion. Our hungry engine insists on having four square meals a day, and even then grows weak and feeble, and demands a snack in between; it slackens, and snorts, and grumbles, till the driver, often aided by the passengers (who seem to enjoy the fun), gets down and cuts a few dainty branches just to appease its appetite, and coax it on to the next station. We pass through the great salt marsh, where the grand old pines, rank on rank, are standing with their roots in pickle, and their half bald heads fringed with green lifted heavenwards. A bush fire has broken out somewhere in the distance, and the flames come leaping along the surface of the marsh, with a blue, lurid-looking light, feeding upon whatever they can find; now they glide in graceful spiral lines, like fiery serpents round the trunk of some grand old tree, and leave it a charred and blackened stump. As the evening shadows fall we enter the cypress swamps; the dusky forms of the forest giants stand stiff and stark in the gloaming, making up a weird and somewhat romantic scene. Night closes in, the great golden moon climbs slowly into the purple skies, and the balmy evening air has a delicious fragrance as though it came from worlds unknown. But with all its sombre subtle charm, a cypress swamp is not exactly the place one would choose to break down in, and just here our engine, which has been crawling and groaning like a crippled maniac for the last half hour, elects to stop short. She (I believe engine is feminine) stops, and shows no sign of ever intending to move again.