It is evening now, and, after the fatigues of a pleasant day's ride, I am seated beneath the piazza {222} of a neat farmhouse in the edge of a forest, through which, for the last hour, my path has conducted, and looking out upon a broad landscape of prairie. My landlord, a high-minded, haughty Virginia emigrant, bitterly complains because, forsooth, in the absence of slave-labour, he is forced to cultivate his own farm; and though, by the aid of a Dutchman, he has made a pretty place of it, yet he vows by all he loves to lay his bones within the boundaries of the "Ancient Dominion." My ride since noon has been delightful; over broad plains, intersected by deep creeks, with their densely-wooded bottoms. These streams constitute one of the most romantic features of the country. I have crossed very many during my tour, and all exhibit the same characteristics: a broad, deep-cut channel, with precipitous banks loaded with enormous trees, their trunks interwoven and matted with tangled underbrush and gigantic vegetation. As the traveller stands upon the arch of the bridge of logs thrown over these creeks, sometimes with an altitude at the centre of forty feet, he looks down upon a stream flowing in a deep, serpentine bed, and winding away into the dusky shades of the overhanging woods, until a graceful bend withdraws the dark surface of the waters from his view. In the dry months of summer, these creeks and ravines are either completely free of water, or contain but a mere rivulet; and the traveller is amazed at the depth and breadth of a channel so scantily supplied. But at the season of the spring or autumnal rains the scene is changed: a deep, turbid torrent rolls {223} wildly onward through the dark woods, bearing on its surface the trunks of trees and the ruins of bridges swept from its banks; and the stream which, a few weeks before, would scarcely have wet the traveller's sole, is now an obstacle in his route difficult and dangerous to overcome.