We set out for the countries known at that time by the general name of the Floridas, today divided into the States of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. We followed, more or less closely, paths now connected by the high-road which runs from Natchez to Nashville, through Jackson and Florence, and which enters Virginia by way of Knoxville and Salem: a country very little frequented at that time, although Bartram[509] had explored its lakes and sites. The planters of Georgia and Florida proper went to the various tribes of the Creeks to buy horses and half-wild cattle, which multiplied indefinitely in the savannahs pierced by the wells at whose edges I placed Atala and Chactas. They even extended their journey as far as Ohio. [Sidenote: I sail up the Ohio River.] We ran before a stiff breeze. The Ohio, swollen by a hundred rivers, passed now through the lakes which opened out before us, now through the woods. Islands stood out in the middle of the lakes. We made sail for one of the largest of these: we came alongside at eight in the morning. I crossed a meadow strewn with ragwort with its yellow flowers, hollyhocks with their pink plumes, and obelarias with purple egrets. An Indian ruin struck my eyes. The contrast between this ruin and the youth of nature, this monument of men in a desert, caused a great emotion. What people dwelt upon this island? Its name, its race, the time of its passing? Did it live at the time when the world in whose midst it lay hidden was as yet unknown to the three other quarters of the globe? The silence of this people was perhaps contemporaneous with the fame of some great nations that have in their turn lapsed into silence[510]. Sandy anfractuosities, ruins or _tumuli_ issued from amid poppies with red flowers hanging at the end of bent, pale-green stalks. The stem and the flower have an aroma which clings to the fingers when one touches the plant. The perfume which outlives the flower is an image of the memory of a life spent in solitude. I observed the nymphæa: it was preparing to hide its white lily beneath the surface at the close of day; the "tree of sadness[511]" was awaiting the night before unfolding its own: the wife retires to bed at the hour when the courtesan rises. The pyramidal œnothera, which is seven or eight feet high, with pale leaves dentated with dark green, has other habits and another destiny: its yellow flower begins to half-open in the evening, during the space of time which Venus occupies in descending below the horizon; it continues to expand by the light of the stars; the dawn discovers it in all its brilliancy; midway through the morning it fades; it falls at noonday. It lives for but a few hours; but it despatches those hours beneath a placid sky, between the breaths of Venus and Aurora: what matters, then, the shortness of life?