CHAPTER XX
LIVE OAK PLANTATION
THE Moultrie plantation, bounded on one side by salt inlets from the sea, on the other by the great Caw Caw Swamp, is said to have been laid out in the days of the buccaneers. No one at the time of the present Moultrie's grandfather could remember when was built the first great dike' which still holds the miles and miles of backwater of the closed reserve from the broad expanse of rice lands which stretch almost to the bayou. During the boyhood of Manning's grandfather huge "loblollys" rose straight from the middle of the long, low mound, and it is not probable that anyone would be so foolish as to build a dike around a growing tree.
Although the greater part of the seven thousand broad acres of the Moultrie estate stretched away toward the swamp in square after square of cultivated marshland, there was a great deal in timbered "high land," which, in the rice belt, means land well above the reach of swamp and tide water; ground having an elevation of perhaps ten feet above the rice dikes.
On such an eminence, surrounded by a park of venerable live oaks, stood the ancestral home of Manning Moultrie. The antiquity of the plantation house itself ranked far beneath that of its environment, the structure having been erected only a little over a hundred years.
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