Sylvan Secrets - 1887 Author:Maurice Thompson 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: SWAMP SKETCHES. A Southern swamp is to me a very fascinating place, a genuine land of dreams. In a realistic sense it is mere mud, water, tussocks, gloom, tan... more »gled vines, and dusky tree- masses ; but there is that in those dim, damp, luxuriant jungles which appeals to all tha is romantic in one's nature. It was my fortune once to pitch my tent on a ridge of sane' lying between the waters of the Gulf o? Mexico and the mazes of a swamp whose almost impenetrable woods and brakes stood like a black wall by night and like a sheeny screen by day set against a sky as tender ax. the-petals of a hyacinth. No sign of human life was near, not even a fisherman's hut. The beach of my sand bar was the most perfect I ever saw—white, hard, and gently sloping out to sea, where the greenish waves ran through dreamy sunshine to the far white line of the horizon. A week of southeasterly winds brought up from the Caribbean islands a soft fragrance and balm, and kept the water in brisk motion, so that it lapped the sand with a melodious roar, and so that a dancing zigzag line of silvery spray marked the surf margin as far as one could see. In the south-west a long crescent of marsh ran from the swamp to the sand. There all manner of sea birds congregated at times with a shimmer of wings and a clash of 4 49voices that touched the imagination strangely enough. My boatmen, both of whom were creoles, so-called, could not imagine why I should have taken such a considerable voyage merely to stay a few days on a sand-bank reading books under a tent-fly, or to make journeys into a dismal and lonely swamp, neither of which would have afforded them any pleasure whatever. They evidently deemed my motives obscure and mysterious, if not wholly unchristian. I chose this particular place mor...« less