From Macon to Columbus, Georgia, he had his first experience in a Southern stage-coach which, while novel, must have proved far from comfortable, for he did not forget to record the jolts caused by miserable roads and reckless driving. Leaving Columbus he was soon in the undulating pine-lands of Alabama, the monotony of which was frequently broken by swamps of palmetto and magnolia. The spirit of the pines must have sung to him, too, for the “sound of the wind in the boughs of the long-leaved pine” always reminded him of the “waves breaking on a distant shore, and it was agreeable to hear it swelling gradually, then dying away as the breeze rose and fell.” Near Chehaw, the stage stopped at a log cabin in the woods for the passengers to dine. It did not look promising, and Lyell was ready to “put up with bad fare,” but on entering found on the table “a wild turkey roasted, venison steaks, and a partridge-pie, all the product of the neighboring forest.” Noticing the stumps of many pines, he counted the rings of annual growth to ascertain how long it would take to replace such a forest. The oldest tree that he examined measured four feet in diameter at three feet above the base, and showed three hundred and twenty rings. He also found the ravines that are common throughout Southern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to be of recent formation and caused by deforestation, showing the tertiary regions and also part of the cretaceous strata which have “always been as destructible as now” to have been from the beginning covered with dense forests. Where the trees have been cut, the sun’s heat on the clay often causes cracks, and when the rains come in semi-tropical torrents these deepen until such ravines as are familiar to Mobilians about Spring Hill are the result--only they are of more rapid growth. At Chehaw they took train for Montgomery. Even at that early time, and in a region “where the schoolmaster has not been much abroad,” we meet the prototype of the newsboy of to-day; Lyell’s picture of him unconcernedly jumping on and off moving trains is the “butcher-boy” we all know. One boy was calling out in the midst of a pine-barren, “a novel by Paul de Kock--the Bulwer of France--all the go!--more popular than the Wandering Jew.” Lyell, having bought newspapers promiscuously throughout the many States he visited, found our press to be in every way on an equal with that of Great Britain. A large portion of the papers was “devoted to literary extracts, to novels, travels, tales, and often more serious subjects.”