Only the African race, who seem by inheritance immune from the dread malarial fever, could have made it possible and profitable to clear the dense cypress swamps and cultivate them in rice by a system of flooding the fields from the river by canals, ditches, and flood-gates, draining off the water when necessary, and leaving these wonderfully rich lands dry for cultivation. It has been said that, like the pyramids, slave labor only could have accomplished it; be that as it may, at this moment one has the pain of watching the annihilation of all this work now, when the world needs food; now when the starving nations are holding out their hands to our country for food, thousands and thousands of acres of this fertile land are reverting to the condition of swamps: land capable of bringing easily sixty bushels of rice to the acre without fertilizer is growing up in reeds and rushes and marsh, the haunt of the alligator and the moccasin. The crane and the bittern are always there, the fish-hawk and the soaring eagle build their nests on the tall cypress-trees left here and there on the banks of the river; the beautiful wood-duck is also always there, and at certain seasons the big mallard or English duck come in great flocks; but, alas, they no longer come in clouds, as they used to do (so that a single shot has been known to kill sixty on the wing). For them too the country is ruined, for them too all is changed. Those that come do not stay. It was the abundant shattered rice of the cultivated fields, flooded as soon as the harvest was over, which brought them in myriads from their nesting-grounds in the far north, to spend their winters in these fat feeding-grounds, in the congenial climate of Carolina. Now there is no shattered rice on which to feed, and in their wonderful zigzag flight they stop a day or two to see if the abundance of which their forefathers have quacked to them has returned, and not finding it they pass on to Florida and other warm climes to seek their winter food. Thus this rich storehouse and granary is desolate. With the modern machinery for making dikes and banks these fields could be restored to a productive condition and made to produce again, without a very heavy expenditure. But alas! those who owned them had absolutely no money, and after the destruction of the banks and flood-gates by the great storm of 1906 no restoration was made. A few of the plantations in Georgetown County have been bought by wealthy Northern men as game-preserves. One multimillionaire, Emerson, who bought a very fine rice-plantation, Prospect Hill, formerly property of William Allston, has some fields planted in rice every year, simply for the ducks, the grain not being harvested at all, but left to attract the flocks to settle down and stay there, ready for the sportsman’s gun.