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The forests between Lake Superior and the Mississippi, where the country is very flat and wet, are composed almost entirely of black cypress; they grow so thick that the tops get intermixed and interlaced, and form almost a matting overhead, through which the sun scarcely ever penetrates. The trees are covered with unwholesome-looking mosses, which exhale a damp earthy smell, like a cellar. The ground is so covered with a rank growth of elder and other shrubs, many of them with thorns an inch long, and with fallen and decayed trunks of trees, that it is impossible to take a step without breaking one's shins. Not a bird or animal of any kind is to be seen, and a deathlike silence reigns through the forest, which is only now and then interrupted by the rattle of the rattlesnake (like a clock going down), and the chirrup of the chitnunck, or squirrel. The sombre colour of the foliage, the absence of all sun even at mid-day, and the vault-like chilliness one feels when entering a cypress swamp, is far from cheering; and I don't know any position so likely to give one the horrors as being lost in one, or where one could so well realise what a desolate loneliness is. The wasps, whose nests like great gourds hang from the trees about the level of one's face; the mosquitoes in millions; the little black flies, and venomous snakes, all add their 'little possible' to render a tramp through a cypress swamp agreeable.—Sullivan's Rambles.