"Nonsense," I answered. "Who would be stupid enough to build a wharf
in the middle of these dreadful marshes in a country inhabited by
savages--that is, if it is inhabited at all?"

"Perhaps it was not always marsh, and perhaps the people were not
always savage," he said drily, looking down the steep bank, for we were
standing by the river. "Look there," he went on, pointing to a spot
where the hurricane of the previous night had torn up one of the
magnolia trees by the roots, which had grown on the extreme edge of the
bank just where it sloped down to the water, and lifted a large cake of
earth with them. "Is not that stonework? If not, it is very like it."

"Nonsense," I said again, but we clambered down to the spot, and got
between the upturned roots and the bank.

"Well?" he said.

But I did not answer this time. I only whistled. For there, laid bare by
the removal of the earth, was an undoubted facing of solid stone laid in
large blocks and bound together with brown cement, so hard that I could
make no impression on it with the file in my shooting-knife. Nor was
this all; seeing something projecting through the soil at the bottom of
the bared patch of walling, I removed the loose earth with my hands, and
revealed a huge stone ring, a foot or more in diameter, and about three
inches thick. This fairly staggered me.

"Looks rather like a wharf where good-sized vessels have been moored,
does it not, Uncle Horace?" said Leo, with an excited grin.