“We have seen some toothsome things in the South, some beautiful scenes, but at this season of the year, at least, the flies and mosquitoes ruined all as thoroughly as the harpies of olden times defiled the feast of the wandering Trojans.

“The great gala-day of Jamesville has dawned, to-day the great Norfolk steamer honors the town with its presence; everybody (and some more) comes down to the wharf to see the wonderful sight.  Here are groups of ‘F.F.’s’ puffing their long pipes and talking the everlasting ’d—­n nigger’; there are crowds of ‘fifteenth amendments’ laughing and frolicking like children, and here, too, the flea-bitten, mosquito-stabbed, black-fly tortured Doctor B. and Professor F., looking northward as the pilgrim to his loved and far-off Mecca.  A scream, a hurrah, a waving of handkerchiefs, and away we go out of the howling wilderness, all that is left of us, and but little indeed that is.

“The Astoria, is but a wretched tub, and we crawl along at the rate of four or five miles per hour, halting here and there to avoid the wrecks of the war, panting for breath, longing, ’as the heart panteth for the water-brook,’ to see once more the shores of our beloved New England.  Never will this excruciating sail be forgotten.  All day—­all night, for long, long, weary hours, the wretched little steamer groaned and screamed its melancholy way over the yellow, nasty Roanoke.

“Hour after hour we sat gazing at the tall cypress-trees and the long trailing mosses, looking like the pale sickly shrouds enveloping a dead and ruined world.  Here and there we saw huge nests of the size and shape of a barrel, and near, on the ruined branch of a lightning-struck tree, perched on its topmost bough, the great bald eagle of the South, keeping his sleepless watch and ward, while the wife-bird tended the household gods below.  Deadly moccasins and huge turtles lay listless in the sun, and hundreds of bushels of blackberries were wasting their sweetness on the desert air.  Now and then there came to us like an inspiration from heaven the ecstatic music of the mockingbird, carrying shame and despair to the breasts of all the other warblers of the aerial choir.

“Nothing could be more inspiring than the notes of this charming singer, as we listened to them here amid these melancholy swamps exhaling the sickly miasma beneath this blighting sun, with not a breath of air to lift the blood red banners of the trumpet creepers, or to cool the fevered brow.  Melancholy waitings are heard from the swamps, and the waves in parting, look like fields of fire.  The winds come to us, but with them no refreshing, for they came over mile after mile of suffocating, reeking lagoons, stifling with the hot breath of the miasma.