Book Description

WORTHY READER, a word with you! Were you ever at Nag's Head? Heard you ever of it? I shall provoke no jealousy on the part of Mr. Wiley, the author of "ROANOKE, OR WHERE IS UTOPIA," by saying a word or two of this Ultima Thule in THE OLD NORTH STATE Geography. Briefly, then, a glance at the map will show you a long bank, varying from a few yards to some furlongs in width, extending like a vast breakwater along almost the entire coast of the Carolinas. Through this there are several inlets from the sea, leading into a cordon of beautiful sounds (among which the ALBEMARLE and the PAMLICO are the most considerable), which separate "THE BANKS" from the mainland. In some places, this ridge is as arid as the shores of the Dead Sea. In others, a dwarfish growth of pine and live-oak light up its grim features into a smile of hospitable welcome, from your packet-experience of bodily compressibility to the free air and unfettered gait of THE LAND. Not a little of the picturesque, too, peeps pleasantly out from among the "Upguoines" (as the Bankers call the oak-crested acclivities), and, if I may burden the reader with my own preferences, NAG'S HEAD, "With some fair spirit for its minister,"appears to me to possess some very decided features of comfort not enumerated in any of the geographies as belonging to COBI or SAHARA, or whatever other "desert" the titled bard affected to long for as his "dwelling-place." May I venture the opinion that his lordship would sooner have paid rent in the dust and cobwebs of Grub Street? NAG'S HEAD is in latitude 35� 30' North, on a narrow part of The Banks, and about midway between Kill-devil Hills and the New Inlet; just at the northern entrance to Roanoke Sound. Enough of description. It was never my forte.