About midway between St. George's Sound and the Gulf coast we traversed a vast swamp, where the ground was carpeted with the dwarf saw palmettos. A fire had killed all the large trees, and their blasted, leafless forms were covered with the flaunting tresses of Spanish moss. The tops of many of these trees were crowned by the Osprey's nest, and the birds were sitting on their eggs, or feeding their young with fish, which they carried in their talons from the sea. So numerous were these fish-hawks that we named the blasted swamp the Home of the Osprey. We spent one night in this swamp serenaded by the deep calls of the male alligators, which closely resembled the low bellowing of a bull. About noon the next day signs of cultivated life appeared, and we passed the houses of some settlers, and the saw-mill of a New Yorker. At dusk our boats entered a little sound, and by nine o'clock in the evening we arrived at the Gulf of Mexico, in a region of shoal water, much cut up by oyster reefs. The tide being very low, the boats were anchored inside of an oyster reef, which afforded protection from the inflowing swell of the sea. We shaped our course next day for St. Marks, along a low, marshy coast, where oyster reefs, in shoal water, frequently barred our progress. From South Cape to St. Marks the coast, broken by the mouths of several creeks and rivers, trends to the northeast, while for twenty miles to the east of the light house, which rises conspicuously on the eastern shore of the entrance to St. Marks River, the coast bends to the southeast to the latitude of Cedar Keys, where it turns abruptly south, and forms one side of the peninsula of Florida. The great contour of the Gulf of Mexico, into which St. Marks River empties, is known to geographers as Apalachee Bay. On that part of the coast between the St. Marks and Suwanee rivers, the bed of the Gulf of Mexico slopes so gradually that when seven miles away from the land a vessel will be in only eighteen feet of water. At this distance from the shore is found the continuous coral formation; but nearer to the coast it is found in spots only. While traversing this coast from St. Marks to Cedar Keys, I observed the peculiar features of a long coast-line of salt marshes, against which the waves broke gently. With the exception of a few places, where the upland penetrated these savannas to the waters of the sea, the marshes were soft alluvium, covered with tall coarse grasses, the sameness of which. was occasionally broken by a hammock, or low mound of firmer soil, which rose like an island out of the level sea of green. The hammocks were heavily wooded with the evergreen live-oaks, the yellow pine, and the palmetto. From half a mile to two miles back of the low savannas of the coast, rose, like a wall of green, the old forests, grand and solemn in their primeval character.