The great rivers of America, the great forests, the fierce electrical storms, the strange methods of agriculture, the lightning bugs, the mosquitoes and the bullfrogs astonished the European. Of the bullfrog, Smyth remarks: “Their note is harsh, sonorous and abrupt, frequently appearing to pronounce articulate sounds, in striking resemblance to the following words: Hogshead tobacco, knee deep, ancle deep, deeper and deeper, Piankitank, and many others, but all equally grating and dissonant. They surprise a man exceedingly, as he will hear their hoarse, loud bellowing clamor just by him, and sometimes all around him, yet he cannot discover from whence it proceeds. They are of the size of a man’s foot.” Bullfrogs by day and the falls by night: “When a person arrives at Richmond his ears are continually assailed with the prodigious noise and roaring of the falls, which almost stuns him and prevents him from sleeping for several nights.” Richmond was close to nature in those days. Captain Smyth used to take walks among the rocks and solitary romantic situations around the falls. His custom was to carry a book in his pocket, and read in the shade until he “insensibly dropt asleep. This was my daily recreation, which I never neglected. But I was once extremely surprised at beholding, as soon as I opened my eyes, a prodigious large snake, within a few feet of me, basking himself in the sun. He was jet black, with a copper-coloured belly, very fine, sparkling eyes, and at least seven feet long.” August 28th Smyth set out for the South. Crossing the James in a ferry-boat early in the morning, he rode through the towns of Rocky Ridge and Warwick (about five miles beyond), stopped at Osborne’s, eight miles from Warwick, and reached Blandford in the afternoon, having crossed the Appomattox by a lofty wooden bridge at the town of Pocahontas, one of the three towns at the falls of the Appomattox--Petersburg, Blandford, Pocahontas. “In Blandford, the charming, pretty town of Blandford, in a beautiful plain on the river brink, on a very pleasant and delightful spot, I found an excellent ordinary at Boyd’s.”