A Little Sister to the Wilderness - 1895 Author:Lilian Bell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II. ON THE LEVEE. IROPPING from the level rim of the country round about, to where through its lowliest center winds a thin silver stream, lie the ... more »low grounds of West Tennessee. Their sloping sides are hidden in a mass of jessamine and wild honeysuckle and columbine, until viewed from the levee which spans its treacherous bogs, it looks like a great bowl filled with a rainbow tangle of Southern bloom. This view of summer beauty gives no hint of the devastating winter flood, when the sinuous windings of "The Creek" creep over its shifting banks and swollen with a slow, sullen rage crawl over reed and bush and tree until a yellow, sluggish sea has overcome the wilderness. The shabby little farms of the poor whites, who live in these bottom-lands, are inundated partially if not wholly every year. Every year while the eager spring sun is drying out the land, the inhabitants are shaking in the mighty grasp of a malaria which, like their sloth, is an inheritance. The steam from the wet earth is like one tremendous washing-day and looks as though all creation had hung itself out to dry. Yet these people do not regard " The Creek " as their enemy. Their philosophy of life is simple. They accept the inevitable, whether of good or ill, with what in Attica might have been termed stoicism. In West Tennessee however, such an energetic term does not apply. Their sublime heights of indifference have been attained, have been foisted upon them rather, by generations of ancestral shiftlessness. Never, if they waded waist-deep in water, would they think of moving and bettering their condition. Malaria only lasts through the summer and the flood only lasts through the winter. They are always patiently waiting for a change of evils. They believe that nature will adjust herself i...« less