evolutional protests of a few blue asters or a few composite
flowers of the coryopsis sort, which contrive to display their
rare flashes of color through the general waving of cat-heads,
blood-weeds, wild cane, and marsh grasses. For, at a hasty
glance, the general appearance of this marsh verdure is vague
enough, as it ranges away towards the sand, to convey the idea of
amphibious vegetation,--a primitive flora as yet undecided
whether to retain marine habits and forms, or to assume
terrestrial ones;--and the occasional inspection of surprising
shapes might strengthen this fancy. Queer flat-lying and
many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in juiciness and
color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time to time;
the moist and weighty air seems heated rather from below than
from above,--less by the sun than by the radiation of a cooling
world; and the mists of morning or evening appear to simulate the
vapory exhalation of volcanic forces,--latent, but only dozing,
and uncomfortably close to the surface. And indeed geologists
have actually averred that those rare elevations of the
soil,--which, with their heavy coronets of evergreen foliage, not
only look like islands, but are so called in the French
nomenclature of the coast,--have been prominences created by
ancient mud volcanoes.

The family of a Spanish fisherman, Feliu Viosca, once occupied
and gave its name to such an islet, quite close to the
Gulf-shore,--the loftiest bit of land along fourteen miles of
just such marshy coast as I have spoken of. Landward, it
dominated a desolation that wearied the eye to look at, a
wilderness of reedy sloughs, patched at intervals with ranges of
bitter-weed, tufts of elbow-bushes, and broad reaches of