From time to time a thicket of exquisite evergreen shrubs broke the monotonous lines of the countless pine shafts rising round us, and still more welcome were the golden garlands of the exquisite wild jasmine, hanging, drooping, trailing, clinging, climbing through the dreary forest, joining to the warm aromatic smell of the fir trees a delicious fragrance as of acres of heliotrope in bloom.  I wonder if this delightful creature is very difficult of cultivation out of its natural region; I never remember to have seen it, at least not in blossom, in any collection of plants in the Northern States or in Europe, where it certainly deserves an honourable place for its grace, beauty, and fragrance.

On our drive we passed occasionally a tattered man or woman, whose yellow mud complexion, straight features, and singularly sinister countenance bespoke an entirely different race from the negro population in the midst of which they lived.  These are the so-called pine-landers of Georgia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth,—­filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature.  They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilised societies, and their countenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the utter degradation of their natures.  To the crime of slavery, though they have no profitable part or lot in it, they are fiercely accessory, because it is the barrier that divides the black and white races, at the foot of which they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of the base freedom which still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of the soil.[3]

[Footnote 3:  Of such is the white family so wonderfully described in Mrs. Stowe’s ’Dred’—­whose only slave brings up the orphaned children of his masters with such exquisitely grotesque and pathetic tenderness.  From such the conscription which has fed the Southern army in the deplorable civil conflict now raging in America has drawn its rank and file.  Better ’food for powder’ the world could scarcely supply.  Fierce and idle, with hardly one of the necessities or amenities that belong to civilised existence, they are hardy endurers of hardship, and reckless to a savage degree of the value of life, whether their own or others.  The soldier’s pay, received or promised, exceeds in amount per month anything they ever earned before per year, and the war they wage is one that enlists all their proud and ferocious instincts.  It is against the Yankees—­the northern sons of free soil, free toil and intelligence, the hated abolitionists whose success would sweep away slavery and reduce the southern white men to work—­no wonder they are ready to fight to the death against this detestable alternative, especially as they look to victory as the certain promotion of the refuse of the ‘poor white’ population of the South, of which they are one and all members, to the coveted dignity of slaveholders.]