Fayetteville Observer

The Alligator.

In one of her letters from Florida, Mrs. Stowe thus writes of the alligator: "Amid this serpent-like and convoluted jungle of scaly root not unnatural to find the scaly alligator, looking like an animated form of the vegetable world around. Sluggish, unwieldy, he seems a half-developed animal, coming up from a plant—perhaps a link from plant to animal. In memory, perhaps, of a previous woodland life, he fills his stomach with pine knots and bits of boards, wherever he can find one to chew. It is his way of taking tobacco. I have been with a hunter who dissected one of these animals, and seen him take from his stomach a mass of bits of brick, worn smooth, as if the digestive fluids had somewhat corroded them. The fore leg and paw of the alligator has a pitiful and rather shocking resemblance to the human hand, and the muscular power is so great that, in case of the particular alligator I speak of, even after his head was taken off, when the incision was made into the pectoral muscle for the purpose of skinning, his black hand and arm rose up and gave the operator quite a formidable push in the chest."