To the hunting, fishing, and exploration of such a river I was never sorry that I had brought my own boat. It was one of the _chefs-d'oeuvres_ of my old schoolmate Ingersoll,--a copper-fastened, clinker-built pleasure-boat, pulling two pairs of sculls, fifteen feet long, comfortably accommodating six persons, and adorned by the builder with a complimentary blue and gilt backboard of mahogany and a pair of presentation tiller-ropes twisted from white and crimson silk. In this boat I and the companion of my exile took much comfort. When we intended only a short row,--some trifle of ten or twelve miles,--we always pulled for ourselves; but on long tours, where the faculties of observation would have been impaired by the fatigue of action, we employed as our oarsman a black man whom I shall call Sol Cutter,--not knowing on which side of the lines he may be at present. Sol, when we first discovered him, was hovering around the Jacksonville wharves, looking for a job. It is so novel to see that kind of thing in the South, that I asked him if he was a free negro. He replied, that he was the slave of a gentleman who allowed him to buy his time. He said "allowed"; but I suspect that the truer, though less delicate, way of putting it would have been to say "obliged" him to, for the sake of a living. Sol's "Mossa Cutter" had remaining to him none of the paternal acres; and it never having occurred to him, that, when lands and houses all are spent, then learning is most excellent, he possessed none of that _nous_ which would have enabled a Northern man to outflank embarrassments by directing his forces into new channels. Having worked a plantation, when he had no longer any plantation to work he was compelled to send his negroes into the street to earn an eleemosynary living for him. This was no obloquy. How many such men has every Southern traveller seen,--"sons of the first South Carolina families,"--parodying the Caryatides against the sunny wall of some low grog-shop during a whole winter afternoon,--their eyes listless, their hands in their pockets, their legs outstretched, their backs bent, their conversation a languid mixture of Cracker dialect and overseer slang, their negroes' earnings running down their throats at intervals, as they change their outside for a temporary inside position,--and all the well-dressed citizens addressing them cheerfully as "Colonel" and "Major," without a blush of shame, as they go by! Goldwin Smith was right in pointing at such men as one of the former palliations for the social invectives of the foreign tourist,--though any such tourist with brains need not have mistaken them for sample Americans, having already been in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The trouble is, that foreign tourists, as a rule, do _not_ have brains. At any rate, they may say to us, as Artemus Ward of his gifts of eloquence,--"I _have_ them, but--I haven't got them with me."