Nor was this an exceptional case, many such appointments having been made, as an inevitable result of a peculiar enfranchisement in which there is no restriction, and where license stands for liberty.  While on my “Voyage of the Paper Canoe,” I met in one county in Georgia, through which flows the beautiful Altamaha, the colored county treasurer, who lived in a little backwoods’ settlement a few miles from Darien.  He could neither read nor write, but his business was managed and the county funds handled by a white politician of the “reconstructing” element then in power, which was sapping the life-blood of the south, and bonding every state within its selfish grasp by dishonest legislative acts.  The poor black man was simply a tool for the white charlatan, living in a miserable log cabin, and receiving a very small share of the peculations of his white clerk.  When all the enfranchised are educated, and not until then, will the great source of evil be removed from our politics which to-day endangers our future liberty of self-government.  We are floating in a sea of unlimited and unlettered enfranchisement, vainly tugging at the helm of our ship of state, while master-minds stoop to cater to the prejudices of hundreds of thousands of voters who cannot read the names upon the ticket they deposit in the ballot-box—­the ballot-box which is the guardian of the constitutional liberties of a republic.

We left the kind people of Apalachicola, and crossed the bay to St. George’s Sound, with a cargo of delicacies, for Captain Fry had filled our lockers with various comforts for the inner man, while our friend, the cattle-owner, whom we had met at Cape San Blas, and who had now returned to his home, stocked us with delicious oranges from his grove on the outskirts of the city.

Four miles to the east of Cat Point we saw the humble homes of Peter Sheepshead and Sam Pompano, two fishermen, whose uniform success in catching their favorite species of fish had won for them their euphonious titles.  We camped at night near the mouth of Crooked River, which enters the sound opposite Dog Island, having rowed twenty-four miles.  If we continued along the sound, after passing out of its eastern end, we would be upon the open sea, and might have difficulty in doubling the great South Cape; so we took the interior route, ascending Crooked River through a low pine savanna country, to the Ocklockony River, which is, in fact, a continuation of Crooked River.  The region about Crooked and Ocklockony rivers is destitute of the habitation of man.

About midway between St. George’s Sound and the Gulf coast we traversed a vast swamp, where the ground was carpeted with the dwarf saw palmettos.  A fire had killed all the large trees, and their blasted, leafless forms were covered with the flaunting tresses of Spanish moss.  The tops of many of these trees were crowned by the Osprey’s nest, and the birds were sitting on their eggs, or feeding their young with fish, which they carried in their talons from the sea.  So numerous were these fish-hawks that we named the blasted swamp the Home of the Osprey.  We spent one night in this swamp serenaded by the deep calls of the male alligators, which closely resembled the low bellowing of a bull.