Penetrating through the thicket of that swamp, I see a great many very straight and slender upright shoots, the slenderest and tallest that I ever saw. They are the Prinos lavigatus. I cut one and brought it home in a ring around my neck,—it was flexible enough for that,—and found it to be seven and a half feet long and quite straight, eleven fortieths of an inch in diameter at the ground and three fortieths diameter at the other end, only the last foot or so of this year’s growth. It had a light-grayish bark, rough dotted. Generally they were five or six feet high and not bigger than a pipe-stem anywhere. This comes of its growing in dense dark swamps, where it makes a good part of the underwood . . .