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Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-three,

BY JOHN ALLEN,

In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

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Ir was as beautiful an evening as a lover could ask, the second day of April, 1842, that I bade my friend Dana good-bye, and started in my sulky for a tour over the land of Nullification. I left Charleston in the evening, that the wearisome task of crossing the river might be over, and the earlier start upon my journey be made the following morning. Tarrying at the house of a fine old planter during the night, who amused me until nearly cock-crowing with his long stories of revolutionary days, I arose, after a very slight refreshment from sleep, and was on my way toward Georgetown an hour before sunrise. It was a toilsome way enough, the road running parallel with the sea-shore the whole distance of sixty miles, just far enough inland never to catch a glimpse of the water, and leading you over a dreary pine barren, where neither house, cultivated field, nor flowing streamlet occurred to divert your attention for the whole day. It was pleasant enough at first to feel one's self alone in those boundless forests of pine; and for an hour or two of the early morning I was sufficiently amused by the novel sight of some young alligator splashing into the water from the road-side, as the noise of my wheels awoke him from his siesta, or of a huge moccasin darting away beneath the dense reeds and lily-pads of the swamp, or of the ever-varying, myriad-toned music of the mocking birds who filled the air with their melody. But by degrees, as the sun began to rise above the trees, and the heavens to assume that brazen face which characterizes a southern sky, the neverchanging scenery about me grew dull and wearisome, and I found myself looking forward in the hope of finding some place by the roadside where my horse might slake his thirst. No such place, however, appeared; on and onward we jogged over that apparently unending level of creaking sand, without one sign of human industry or human life. As matters began to grow serious, and my

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