Letter XII.

Savannah.

Picolata, East Florida, April 7, 1843.

As I landed at this place, a few hours since, I stepped into the midst of summer.  Yesterday morning when I left Savannah, people were complaining that the winter was not over.  The temperature which, at this time of the year, is usually warm and genial, continued to be what they called chilly, though I found it agreeable enough, and the showy trees, called the Pride of India, which are planted all over the city, and are generally in bloom at this season, were still leafless.  Here I find every thing green, fresh, and fragrant, trees and shrubs in full foliage, and wild roses in flower.  The dark waters of the St. John’s, one of the noblest streams of the country, in depth and width like the St. Lawrence, draining almost the whole extent of the peninsula, are flowing under my window.  On the opposite shore are forests of tall trees, bright in the new verdure of the season.  A hunter who has ranged them the whole day, has just arrived in a canoe, bringing with him a deer, which he has killed.  I have this moment returned from a ramble with my host through a hammock, he looking for his cows, and I, unsuccessfully, for a thicket of orange-trees.  He is something of a florist, and gathered for me, as we went, some of the forest plants, which were in bloom.  “We have flowers here,” said he, “every month in the year.”

I have used the word hammock, which here, in Florida, has a peculiar meaning.  A hammock is a spot covered with a growth of trees which require a richer soil than the pine, such as the oak, the mulberry, the gum-tree, the hickory, &c.  The greater part of East Florida consists of pine barrens—­a sandy level, producing the long leaved pine and the dwarf palmetto, a low plant, with fan-like leaves, and roots of a prodigious size.  The hammock is a kind of oasis, a verdant and luxuriant island in the midst of these sterile sands, which make about nine-tenths of the soil of East Florida.  In the hammocks grow the wild lime, the native orange, both sour and bitter-sweet, and the various vines and gigantic creepers of the country.  The hammocks are chosen for plantations; here the cane is cultivated, and groves of the sweet orange planted.  But I shall say more of Florida hereafter, when I have seen more of it.  Meantime let me speak of my journey hither.

I left Charleston on the 30th of March, in one of the steamers which ply between that city and Savannah.  These steamers are among the very best that float—­quiet, commodious, clean, fresh as if just built, and furnished with civil and ready-handed waiters.  We passed along the narrow and winding channels which divide the broad islands of South Carolina from the main-land—­islands famed for the rice culture, and particularly for the excellent cotton with long fibres, named the sea-island cotton.  Our fellow-passengers were mostly planters