last tax sale, and was for sale at the land office in Albany.  We bought the entire section, less 500 acres, taxes on which had been paid, for the sum of $600,—­thus securing for the Club a tract of 22,500 acres.  My cough was increasing alarmingly, and, when I consulted a physician at New York, he advised me to get home and to bed as quickly as I might; so, returning to Boston, I called together the executive committee of the Club to dinner, made my report, drank a glass of champagne to the future lodge, and went to bed in the early stages of pneumonia, which kept me prostrate six weeks.

I owed it to the fortunate and intelligent woodcraft of my guides that I was not caught in the depth of the forest by the increasing lung trouble, probably never to return to civilization.  It was the closest shave to death that I have ever had, and the actual survey of the tract, buried four feet deep in snow, without a shelter or other bed than the ground, would in all probability have finished me, for I barely escaped as it was; but I was determined to finish my work, animated by the same incomprehension of, rather than indifference to, the danger before me which had obtained in my Hungarian expedition and in many other circumstances of my life.  Something of the splendid physical health I brought back with me from the Wilderness helped me, no doubt, through the attack of pneumonia and pleurisy, which released me in the early spring, when I was ordered off to Florida to recuperate.  Being advised not to occupy myself with painting while there, I bought a photographic apparatus, and learned photography as it was practiced in 1857,—­a rude, inefficient, and cumbersome apparatus and process for field work, of which few amateurs nowadays can conceive the inconveniences.

This trip—­for the means to make which I was indebted to Norton, my illness having exhausted my resources, and the great crisis which had broken over New York the year before having swept off the fortune of my brother—­gave me a sight of the South before the war, with slavery and the patriarchal system at its perfection.  I went up the St. John’s River, and took board at a plantation called Hibernia, one of numerous similar establishments on the river, hotels proper not existing there.  The owner of the plantation, old Colonel Fleming, was one of the traditional patriarchal planters, and the experience I gained there certainly agreed with the views of the institution of slavery entertained by the great majority of Southern people I have known.  I never heard of the punishment of a slave, or saw a discontented negro; the black children were the jolliest little creatures I ever saw in clothes, and the adults seemed to do as much or as little work as they pleased.