Dickens Travels in Charleston and SC - 1861

From All the Year Round by Charles Dickens

SCENERY OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

Of " the old thirteen" states, perhaps not one is generally so disregarded by American poets and novelists as North Carolina, in spite of its fierce Indian wars, and of Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to colonise it ; in spite of its stormy capes of Hatteras and Look-out, of its wood men and turpentine-gatherers ; in spite of its gold region and copper-lands, its shad fisheries, and its great Dismal Swamp.

Though North Carolina was the first state that solemnly renounced allegiance to the English crown, that historical fact is not attractive to travellers, and they seldom venture up the Great Fedee and the Wateree rivers. Even the rocks that still show traces of Indian paintings, and the bold precipices of Hickory-nut Gap, fail to allure any one but the pedlar and the omnipresent bagman.

But South Carolina has claims that are already recognised by the poet and historian as well as by the trader and pedlar. In 1678, when the English first settled amid the great pine tracts ana broad lagunes that girdle Charleston, Locke framed a constitution for the infant colony, and modelled it upon the Promised Land of Plato. Amid Shaftesbury's turbulent intrigues, and the vices of Whitehall, the mind of that amiable philosopher was absorbed in dreams of purer faith and purer life in the bright unstained new country, where men had room at once to widen their tents and enlarge their frontiers. Twenty years later, and the brave sturdy men who felled the pines and irrigated the rice in South Carolina, were recruited by bands of honest French Huguenots, driven from Lan- guedoc by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the cruel dragonnades that followed Louis the Fourteenth's senseless act of mad and suicidal bigotry.

It is to this infusion of French blood — and pugnacious Camisard blood, too — that I attribute much of the peculiar fervour and almost reckless impetuosity that mark the character of the people of this state. On a frontier where they have had to grapple perpetually with bear and Indian, and to struggle for foothold with snake and panther — with a coast to defend as well as a land frontier — the Palmetto state naturally gave birth to men who were by instinct warriors.

As the Spaniards were made chivalrous and bigoted by the long struggles for very existence with the Moors, so the Carolinians became generous and irascible : partly from climate, and partly from their long wars with the Yenasee Indians and with the Spaniards of Florida. Was it any wonder, that, when the revolution broke out, it found the rice- swamp people the first to run to arms and the last to leave the field? Was it any wonder that the rice-swamp people, beside their tepid lagunes and broad-scorched savannahs, fought with more persistence, self-sacrifice, and fierceness, than the people of almost any other state ?

Wherever you go in Carolina, whether on lagoons where you scare the alligator amid the cypress-trees, whether by maize-field or cotton tracts, you are shown some spot where English and Americans once met at push of bayonet. At Georgetown you see where that impetuous General Marion destroyed the English forts. You go to the Thicket Mountains, and they point out where Tarleton and the Britishers lost the battle of the Cowpens. Near Goshville you come upon the spot where we English fell back, after losing a thousand men and fifteen hundred stand of arms. A tulip-tree, on which it is said ten Tories were hung, and Hanging Rock where Hunter a partisan chief effected wonders, are two of the lions of this volcanic state.

Here, too, near Pendletown, lived that fire brand of the slave states, Mr. Calhoun, whom General Jackson, on his death-bed, half regretted he had not hanged. But let me now, as my space is brief, throw my recollections of Carolina into a series of short panoramas : condensing into each of them as many days of travel as I can.

I am in Georgia, moving on to Carolina, and finally to Charleston, that city so dear to southern memories, which gave birth to Gadsden, Moultrie, Rutledge, Legare, Lowndes, Poinsett, and other American celebrities. I am, this steaming hot yellow-feverish morning, turning my back on Savannah— one of the most extra ordinary places I have ever been in, with its avenues of China-trees, its orange hedges, and its enormous magnolias, showering down their rose-coloured blossoms on silent funereal streets three feet deep in sand. I am on a small steamer that is to take me some hours up the i river to Augusta. A thick feverish woolly fog wraps the quay of Savannah, with its mountains of coals, its bags of rice, and its bales of cotton ; the great blocks of warehouses, where two travelling friends of mine went last night after the firemen procession to book their passage for New York, loom out like palaces of Plutus in the blind white fog, that melts them into dreamy chaos and hopeless oblivion. The boat is a very rude one, and only meant for day journeys. It has a raised cabin at one end, where prudent men retreat from the dangerous morning fog that now broods and smothers the river, and will do till the sun arises just as we cross into Carolina.

The planks of the small steamer are dank with the mist. The boat is a dirty slovenly boat, and is to be given up in a few weeks, on the opening of some new branch Carolina railway. Its very funnel looks hopeless, and so do its few deck hands. Engineers there are none ; the two rough men who attend to the engine, are amateurs who don't understand the fires, which is why we go so slowly. The captain, who eves them in a careless and deprecatory way, is a drunken-looking man of fifty, with greasy coat and a red nose. He sings, " I would I were in Mobile Bar, Loading cotton all the day !" as we throb down the steaming river towards the rice plantations, now in stubble. As the Savannah newspaper of the morning, though noisy about the Irrepressible Conflict, is not only dull but very small, and is full of no thing but advertisements of rewards for runaway negroes.and offers of election lamps for night processions, and political banners, 1 look round the cabin for amusement, being afraid to brave that dangerous chilly fog.

There is an old negress with a red-striped Creole handkerchief tied round her head, and gilt earrings in her ears, talking to her daughter over two basketfuls of eatables brought for the deck passengers' breakfast, for it is not yet six o'clock. They are busy aud fussy and anxious, as negro people always are, and seem to be doing a great stroke of business. The only first-class passengers besides myself are the overseer of a rice plantation, and two turpentine merchants from North Carolina. Up the thick yellow Savannah river, where the mud is earthy red, we push so quietly that the only sound that breaks the morning stillness is the " ugh, ugh" from our funnel, as if a sleeping giant were breathing somewhere down below. And now the fog looms whiter and more clarified, and slowly over the rice-swamps on the eastern bank (which is on our right-hand side) burns out the sun, like a red-hot coal that has fallen on a pile of cotton flock and has, at last, smouldered through it. It reminds me of Cuyp's golden mists, or still more of that admirable Dutch ballad of Browning's, The Ride to Ghent : At Aerechott, up leaped of a sudden the sun, And against him the cattle stood black every one. For now the seething whiteness, so chill and damp, fires into yellow, then by quick stages melts into fiery orange.

The golden orb glows through at last, and the very alligator, fathom deep in the mud, awakes and knows that day has dawned in Carolina. And now, too, as the river's banks with the tall brown reeds show themselves, I see a dead tree, and, on its highest scathed bough, two black specks which the captain tells me are bald-headed eagles ; and yonder is a crane, " poor Joe," disconsolate, fishing on one leg — as if he had just felt the cramp, or symptoms of incipient gout in the other, and were thinking whether he should dine off fish to-day or not. Now I and the rest, warming ourselves in the sun, come down the steps from the high cabin and stand on the lower deck, at the Tiead of the vessels just by the fires. There is a cask full of ashes at our feet, and a great littering heap of coals and pine-wood, together with a cogged wheel going to some rice-mill on the river, in care of those honest-looking engineers with hammers and tool bags, who stand near the engine-room door.

I am remarking to the captain, Mr. Noah Sickles, who has been upholding the excellence of alligator steaks, the curious fact, that every second woman yon meet, at Savannah is dressed in widow's weeds. Captain Noah replies, "Wall, it ain't nohow healthy, that's a fact," and looks over the ship's side, to see if he can show me an alligator ; a " regular whaler" having been seen by him amusing himself on a log, just by General Oglethorpe's house, not ten days ago. Suddenly my eye falls on a square- looking case, carefully directed, that has been thrown carelessly down by some nigger stevadores, just by the dust heap, and half of it resting upon the litter of coals that strews the deck near the engine-room door. I think it is a grand piano, for it is labelled "Peabody's metallic hermetically sealed cases;" and directed to Mrs. Esther Greeley, Richmond, Virginia.

. . . But I see in it another proof of that recklessness and heedlessness of death that so specially marks the American, and which still remains a problem for the thinker. Perhaps the best solution of it is, that such heedlessness arises from no want of heart, but rather from that perpetual looking to the future instead of to the past which marks a new people, and from that fierce disregard of life that is always to be found in a frontier race, who are too busy and too warlike to waste much time in sentimental reflection.

The captain, turning round here, declares his belief that we shall see no " 'gater to-day, for it is getting late in the year." He then launches out into stories of the 'gaters generally on this river, and of their almost " superolateral" cunning. He declares that on one occasion some dots at a rice-plantation near Augusta came to him, and told him they had been shooting at a 'gater for three days running and yet could not kill him. They had found his nest in a swamp, and had been waiting near it. So off he went with his rifle, and aiming first at the soft pouches under the 'gater's eyes, then at the boss on. the crown of the 'gater's head, turned the 'gater over -with the third shot, and made steaks of his flesh and boots of his skin. Wall, I guess those boys told the captain that they see that 'gater one day pursue a deer across the river, and the second day come floating up near some pigeons, with a sort of garland of grape-vine twisted round his head to hide it ; and the captain had reason to place some reliance in this, for, on opening the 'gater's body, he found inside it two pigeons whole and undigested. "Oh, he was a reg'lar whaler!" says the captain. On this immortal occasion of shooting the whaler, the captain had recourse to the old lure of all 'gater hunters— to a dog trained to yelp, and so attract the 'gaters, who like dog above all other meats. When a 'gater is floating down a stream, half asleep, unless you catch the winking of his eye, it is almost impossible, the captain says, to distinguish the wretch from a rusty log that has drifted from the bank.

The captain is an odd drunken being, with much of the conversational traditions of the old English coachman. If you notice a bundle of fresh-caught cat-fish hanging, still panting with life, at the cabin-door, he begins about negroes fishing, and of the enormous weight of occasional cat-fish ; and if I refer to the late Mr. Greeley in the large sardine-box, he has stories to tell of the cholera in Savannah, when there were dead-houses built in every quarter of the city, and when carts full of coffins were perpetually seen going round for bodies. But as to his boat, he takes no heed of it, except to lament occasionally that the engineers don't know how to feed engine fires with anything but pine-wood. As to the passengers, he takes no care of them either, except now and then to stop a " 'gater story," and assure the two millwrights tbat a dug-out with an old niggur will be sure to be waiting twenty miles further on, to paddle them to Mr. Laroche's rice-plantation : as indeed comes to pass.

Now we begin to get deeper among the rice- fields. They spread on either side of us, dotted here and there with negroes' cabins, and now and then by a planter's house. That wooden tower on the bank, with open sides and a pierced floor, is where they winnow the rice — the good grains fall below, the chaff and dust fly off above. Those green lined fields are the rice- fields, and those thin sharp green blades rising among the stubbly stalks are young rice-plants, soon to be cut off by frost. Those dams are the self-regulating dams that check the irrigation of the swampy fields, whose malaria white men can brave in winter only.

It is the necessity of perpetually sluicing these rice-fields and laying them for days under water, that makes these rice districts of Carolina specially deadly to the European: so deadly, that every bale of Carolina rice may be said to cost a human life. Fifteen days after sowing, these fields are laid under water, and again when the beautiful buuehes of snowy nutritious seed are all but ripe ; also, I believe, during some intermediate state as well.

The great dread of the rice- planter is the rice-bird ; just as the crop is ripe, these birds come in enormous flocks. The bird is a little bird with brown body and yellow wings, and, when the rice is over, goes to the north, just in time for the fruit season. Now, the captain explains to me that rice-land is very valuable, as it is only certain level tracts near rivers that are fit for the purpose of growing rice.

That land there, mere ooze, half water and half mud, could be reclaimed into rice-land, though now it is all over wild oats and reeds ; but it must be sufficiently drained, so that the negroes can leave it clear and warm at certain stages of ripening.

That sloping land in the distance, up towards the pine-woods, would never grow rice. It is too far off for irrigation. Here on the Savannah river, as often in Charleston afterwards, I take pains to ascertain the truth of the common Southern assertion, that white labour could not be used in the feverish rice-grounds. Irishmen have not been tried at it, but they have been tried in the equally dangerous irrigation of marshy lands on the banks of the Mississippi. There, fired with bad whisky, these reckless, hardy sons of toil work in gangs under a burning sun which even a negro at noon-day cannot and is not allowed to face, engaged in piling up those huge ramparts or levees, as the Southerners call them, which each district along the river is obliged to keep in repair, to save the whole country round from per petual floods. " Why do they not employ the slaves ?" My dear friend, for this simple and intelligible reason : Slaves are too valuable to be employed in such dangerous labour. But 1 must away with speed.

Imagine me, then, a day or two after this, on a Carolina rail way, racing on to Charleston, through leagues of aromatic pine-woods. A planter sitting next to me has been telling me, with infinite quaintness, quite unconscious of the cruelty that coloured the story, of a fat dropsical nigger he once hired, who would sleep all day, and used to torment his overseer by talking in au absurd way about dying of fever. " Well, what did the overseer, who was a cute man, do, but go and buy a bundle of green cow-hides, and every day for a fortnight that overseer made that dropsical nigger walk round the shed where the cotton-press was kept, he welting him all the time with the cow-hide. But such was the 'tarnal obstinacy of that drop sical nigger, that, would I believe it, he would not get well, and had eventually to be sent home? Oh, those niggers ! they are the pig- headedest critturs in the world."

More pines — a coppery red on their scaly serpent-like trunks — their foliage dark and saturnine ; no birds sing among their branches, but at their feet red bramble-stalks, arching and stunted crimson undergo wthof maple and glossy arbutus. At every station are great sacrificial altars of split pine-logs, distilling resin ; and as we stop to take in fuel I hear the chump and clump of the logs as they are thrown into the fireman's tender. Everywhere rise delicious breathings of aroma from pine-woods, till I begin almost to believe with Bacon and the empirical doc tors that " such resinous smells do specially fortify the brain, and recruit the wasted spirits ;" all resinous smells, from pitch and turpentine, being peculiarly grateful to me. The fragrance reminds me, too, of the woods about the mountains that wall in Attica ; for, by that old trick of the mind, the past seems always to me to have been golden, and the present to be lead : such a strange alchemist is Memory.

But now I find more attractive metal than the quaintly cruel planter, in a pretty Baltimore girl (the Baltimore women are the wonders of America), who, artless and unaffected as Imogenc or Miranda, is playing with a pretty grey squirrel she has tamed, and which now leaps aud glides all over the long rail way carriage, to everybody's amusement and my special delight. It flies over the backs of our seats, skims down the centre way, sidles under my arm, nibbles at a bit of " corn dodger" some one throws him, but always, sooner or later, with little staring timid eye, with bushing tail and pretty supplicative paws, hurries back, and slips quietly into his mistress's pocket, out of which every now and then his inquiring head and bright beady eyes peer out.

Let us leave the seaboard, and pass to the high sandy bluffs that further northward give way to mountain ledges, granite crags, and the splashing silver of such falls as those of Slicking. There, listening to stories of Indian chiefs and revolutionary combats, you may, from some rocky nest high up near the eagle, look down on sweet little coves of greensward, patches of maize, and rude log-cabins.

But it is in such scenery as you find in the lowland of Carolina, round Midwarry, that the roaming Englishman specially delights. There, you can find pine-woods, every third tree gashed and scarred to bleed out its turpentine, and further on, the huge bald cypress; with its boughs hung with beards of the grey dead-looking Spanish moss ; there, bushes of the laurel, green and glittering in the sun, with spear headed leaves. Here, too, are the fragrant bay-tree and the murderous ivy ; here, amid this tropical vegetation, which in summer breathes deadly airs fatal to all but negroes, who alone remain all the year among it. The live oak and orange grow side by side. On these trees the wild grape-vine, laden with fruit, hangs in fibrous festoons thick and strong as cables.

Or, strolling on the banks of the river, you may hear the raftmen blowing their signal horns; or you may wander by the negro cabins, each with its garden and dovecot, for the negro is allowed to sell his master vegetables, fruit, and poultry. But often my own taste led me to the wild swamps round Turtle Cove, or to some of the more retired inlets and bayous. Here, stepping cautiously, for fear of snakes or alligators, you stride over some fallen tree that bridges the water, and pierce through avenues of ghostly cypresses, from which the moss hangs down in hoary drifts, like shreds of funeral banners in a chancel vault. Everywhere, is a sense of desolation, terror, despair, and death.

But let me tell one of my Southern dreams, after a week's roaming in South Carolina. I am at a planter's house towards sunset, and I pass by the negro quarters, on my way to see a negro wedding — Mr. Sambo Smith and Miss Clara Brown. Everywhere I hear the banjo and the "Yah, yah!" of the dancers.

Tired of the noise and tumult of boisterous happy fun, I wander on towards a cypress swamp. I pass into the wood — a blaze of tropical colour, with autumn leaves, that now echo with the voices of the mocking-bird, most versatile of fioriturist singers. I leap into a dry rut, and push through the arching cypress roots deeper into the swamp. Suddenly it gets darker and deeper. The owl hoots above me, for here it is perpetual twilight. The snake hisses, the bull-frog groans like a half-lost spirit.

No birds sing in this poisonous den of death. The foliage seems to drip baneful dews ; the earth is dank wet ; as those wild-ducks fluster up along the lagoon, a huge sleeping alligator rouses from the sedgy grass ; and as " the skeleton crane" flies off shrieking, the steel-backed monster slides back into the green ooze that slowly absorbs him. Yonder he goes, steering slowly with his ridgy back, and now only his long head shows above the stream. Heaven above us ! Is that fire that bars the sky between the dark cypress-trees — broad widening veins of blood-colour like so many avenging angels' swords ?

No. That is the great conflagration of sunset commencing, rehearsal of the Last Day, beautiful yet terrible ! It is not the fire of burning towns yet : the region of the South still slumbers in peace. Yet who shall say for how long ? Do not let me forget that, though violent and impetuous as when they once before revolted from the union and were "whipped back," even northern American writers love to extenuate the faults of the Carolina people, and allow them to be — to use their own words — remarkable for "an ease, a grace, a generosity, and largeness of character, incompatible with the daily routine of the petty occupations and struggles of modern commercial life." Further, that the Carolina planters are men of an old stock, accustomed to live in the country alone, uncontrolled, and habituated for generations to the institution of slavery.

MR. SINGLEMAN ON TEA.. Let there be no misunderstanding. Here is to be no scandal about Queen Howqua, no cowardly vilification of the tender wiry-leaied Pekoe, not a word against the exquisite essence and elegant extract, no cowardly stabbing- in the dark ! The mau who could unhandsomely take advantage of the present sour temperament of the public mind towards the Celestials, inflamed as it is by war and loot and tales and rich indemnities, and turn this popular fury to the disparagement of an innocent and harmless beverage, is fit for those hackneyed treasons, stratagems, and spoils. For him may some sly nymph covertly moisten a third, nay, a fourth time, exhausted grounds, and fill Mm forth a pale solution with a winning smile ! Blasphemy against Bohea, soothing cheerer and no iuebria- tor ?

No, not for worlds ! I must be permitted to set myself rectus in jj curia and above suspicion. Let me fortify myself in advance by loud praises and vehement protests of admiration. For it will come to pass that later in this paper I shall have to say what savours of hostility to the delectable beverage, more, indeed, in the manner of mild remonstrance — in sorrow rather than in anger — as one might chide a well-beloved but wayward child. Alas ! I am as a preacher who loveth his own sin. Confidentially and by way of confession, I own to a tenderness amounting almost to the illicit fox this seductive extract. For the alcoholic sisterhood, your "spirits," whiskies, brandies, gins — above all, for the hot miscellany produced by intermarriage or admixture of hot waters with those distilled ethers — I have no manner of toleration. I fancy those stimulants only with a qualification : exceptionally that is, as a familiar whom I should be glad to see drop in now and then. But, for that softer maiden, so fair, so equable in temperament, so constant and habitual, yet never cloying, who waits on us neat-handed every morning and every evening from the cradle to the grave, I have not words to glorify her decent virtues. And yet I love my love with a qualification, and shall pro test against her anon. Tea is of Arcadia tea, and has an innocent pastoral flavour. I suspect it was popular in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. The stronger drinks have all the glare and guilt, the educated villany of the cities. Only consider her of the mornings, when the world is stretch ing itself wearily, and putting off its sleep ; . . .



CHARLESTON CITY.

It seems but yesterday that I was standing on the pleasant battery terrace at Charleston, looking out across the tumbling green waves towards the forts that guard the harbour ; and now here I am, in a dull house, buried, as all London just now is, deep under a dumb flood of yellow opaque fog, above which I see St. Paul's alone rising enormous, as a floating ark breasting the murky deluge.

Let me retrace those steps, and imagine myself again at Charleston. I am staying at the "Mill's House," a noble palace of an hotel, in the chief street of the city. I have left my two travelling companions, Paul Allan and Silas Allan, of Washington county, Texas, to play at billiards, while I stroll out on the battery, to get an appetite for the four o'clock hotel dinner.

What a delicious July morning. What a blue serene tide of warm melted azure floats above the palmetto trees, and flowering magnolias of this metropolis of South Carolina. How pleasantly and with how lover-like a whisper the immense waves coquettishly run up and kiss the broad square rampart stones of the terrace on which I stand. How deftly the little fishing-boats scud in, with a sweep and a swirl, taking down and huddling up their blowzy brown sails, as they float calmly into the inner harbour, where idle craft rock and flap in the tepid green water !

And now, as I am off to Charleston Early in the morning, let me look seaward, and note what catches my vagrant eye, first premising that Charleston, founded in 1670, and deriving its name from that black-wigged debauchee Charles II., pleasantly displays its houses on a point of land where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet to form its harbour, and lave the shining coppered keels of its Northern shipping with seventeen feet of deep rolling brine. I do not wonder that the Charleston people love their sea-side walk, for the heat bursts on you here, as from a burning fiery furnace suddenly thrown open, and all beyond the Ashley river, among the white cotton-helds, the heat is African — as the labourers are also. And as for Augusta way, the glare from the white sand tracts there would blister your face if it were not for the green coolness of the pine boughs above, that you look up at and snatch comfort from, in the eager manner in which a Southern glutton drinks gulps of ice water between his spoonfuls of intolerably delicious pepper-soup.

Here, up and down the embrasured terraces, at right angles to each other, the fair yellow mulattoes and shiny black negress nurses wander, with their faces turned to the sea, wooing the fluttering breeze that fans black cheeks and white cheeks with Divine impartiality. I am leaning over the clean-cut warm stones of the battery wall, only the faintest beads of the spray now and then reaching my hot face, and am dying to map in my mind the chief features of the land-locked bay.

I hear from the public gardens behind me, where the pines grow so tall and massy, the laughing voices of the playing children. Suddenly the deep bay of a large St. Bernard dog arouses me from my brown study. I look round, and see a gentleman-like well- dressed man, with two large dogs riotous at his heels, one of whom, as he flings his stick into the leaping waves, dashes in with the boisterous alacrity of a faithful body-guard, not with the lazy sullenness of a demoralised slave. The dog reappears with the stick, and shaking himself till he looks like a trundled mop, half drenches us in the triumph of his joy. The master's apologies for his thoughtless companion, and my regrets that any apologies should be thought needful, lead to a friendly conversation.

Venatico, as I will call him, begins to talk about the fishing vessels that lie iu flocks and spots out yonder to the west, fishing for a fish with a wonderful Indian name that I can neither spell nor pronounce, and which is only found in the sea round Charleston. The crews are all hired negroes, he says, and are very profitable to their temporary masters.

Venatico bids me also remark that, like Venice, at first view Charleston city seems growing out of the waves. He points me out the chief features of the harbour. The low dark lines of shore, the white houses of Mount Pleasant, and the low light-coloured forts, black-dotted where the cannons' eyes look out for the enemy blankly. That block of a fort there, full at the entrance, is Fort Pinckney. It is built on what was formerly a dangerous shoal, but I believe is not strong, or was not when Carolina first seceded.

Close by this fort is the only true channel, for, nearer to the right, by Sullivan's Island, where Fort Moultrie stands, it is impassable to any but fishing-boats, the water runs so shallow. That rising ground to the left is Mount Pleasant, where the Charleston people retreat to bathe and sleep during the midsummer, when King Yellow Fever too often hoists his sickly banner over this low-lying city. Nor must I forget James's Island, with its old ruined fort, or threatening Fort Sumter, that can, if it choose, sweep the bay with its fire-breathing cannon. Venatico points me out also, the sandy corner of Mount Pleasant behind which lie sea-side eountry-houses, the quiet joys of which he expatiates on.

Nearer to the left are the low swamps that render the city at times so unhealthy ; for they breathe out their poison at night, and the great heat is by day perpetually distilling fever from their steamy vapour. Do 1 see that steamer, that mows and puffs and yet seems scarcely to move, out there in the offing between Fort Sumter and Mount Pleasant P I do.

" Well, sir." It is the New York steamer. The pilot, trying to make a quicker passage than usual, and so get puffed and advertised in the local newspapers, has tried to push by a near cut over a famous shoal, which every fishing urchin in the city knows. These men are so reckless ! — if the tide goes down, and he is not off, he will have to wait there many hours. It does not look far, but it must be five miles to where the steamer is, for it is six miles to the fort at the mouth of the bay.

Now, the steamer sends up a red palmetto flag-signal, and the telegraph goes to work — I suppose she wants a tough little tug to drag her off the sucking sand. What a fluster and fuss she is in ! breathing out white smoke as if she were quite blown by her exertions. Now, her wheels toss the froth for ward as she tries to back off ; but all in vain : the reckless pilot's imprudence must be expiated by the loss of a day.

Now, Venatico, walking to a fresh point of view, shows me which way the Cooper river, and which way the Ashley runs. The Cooper river — the Etiwando of the Indians — is bordered by rice-fields, and in its stream bossy alligators float and wallow. The Ashley, broad and grand, flowing between green banks, once regions of great wealth, boasts its ancient mansions dating back to the time when the Red Skins beleaguered this rich city of the South. It is these two rivers — both named, I believe, after that dangerous friend of liberty, Lord Shaftesbury — that bear up to the long piers and quays of Charleston her bags of rice, ner padded bales of cotton, her brown sheaves of tobacco, her piles of pine lumber, and her black casks of tar, pitch, and turpentine, from North Carolina and the western forests.

They bring up, too, all the food that goes to feed the sixty-five thousand inhabitants of Charleston, the dangerous minority of whom (nearly thirty thousand) are slaves. It is the farms on these twin rivers that contribute all the spring food of New York and other northern cities ; for South Carolina, it must be remembered, grows more rice on its river-banks and swamps than any other state in the Union ; and all this rice comes to Charleston, to be propelled thence by steam to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and even to Havannah and Florida.

This rich and learned city (Charleston), so proud of her many public libraries, museums, and schools, is a great depot for the West — a station for the transit trade to the great interior. No city on the Atlantic had more commerce than Charleston once had, but it has undergone many fluctuations. The trade is now reviving and spreading forth its branches, if this impending intestine war do not lay the axe to its spreading roots. The American writers say that " Charleston is slowly building up a marine of her own that will one day challenge the famous grease-keeled clippers of Baltimore, ' the city of monuments.' "

When I recur to those azure mornings that I passed in the battery at Charleston, looking out across the waves at the little yellow embrasures on Mount Pleasant and on Sullivan's Island — on Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter, all sleeping in the sunshine like so many basking turtle— as from the city came to me over the gardens the clash and chime of an election band, " Death or Douglas!" — I can scarcely credit that it is the same city that I now read of, where, as I hear, thin yellow faces peer all day through embrasures — where the lurid port fires cast blue glimmers by night upon the harbour waves roaring between Sullivan and Long Islands— where armed brigantines of the Northern states stand " off and on," willing to wound and yet afraid to strike — where nightly signal-rockets fire the sky, and where by day inflammatory red palmetto flags flutter out over the town.

But here to go back to the azure morning, let me follow Venatico as he rhapsodies on the coolness and healthiness of the forest drives round Mount Pleasant, and of the three miles' hard beach, so grateful to horses' hoofs, along the shores of the east end of Sullivan's Island, where the sea struggles with the shoals, and tries to work its roaring aggressive way, fierce as rebellion, ruthless as tyranny, into the estuaries between the two islands.

Near Fort Moultrie, on the sea line, he tells me, with all the chivalrous exultation of a Charleston man justly proud of his city, is where Colonel Thompson, with only seven hundred Carolina Rifles, defeated, in 1776, our Sir Henry Clinton : what time Fort Moultrie bruised and beat off our Sir Peter Parker from the southern end of the island. In fact, there is no want of memories in this city to keep awake remembrances of the War of Independence. At the Haddril headland you can still trace the old lines (now nearly covered by Mount Pleasant) that defended the city eighty years ago from our bayonet and cannon. Three times our unlucky armies beleaguered Charleston, which surrendered at last, but only after a two months' siege, when half the city was burnt to mere black planks and shattered stones, and when the people were dying by cartfuls of famine. Here, too, in the inner city, the poorest negro is proud to show the old Custom House where the Britishers imprisoned the patriots; it was from this building that one of them (Hayne, a saint in the American calendar) was led to execution. Of these and such things as these, Venatico talks (kind cicerone that he is) as we wander round the city, once of wood, now of brick. He tells me how the Indians once poured from the pine woods and hemmed the city in; then, how the Spanish and French fleets girdled the harbour. He plans me out drives to-day to the Magnolia Cemetery, a beautiful grave-place on the Cooper river, where the live oak, bearded with Spanish moss, grows luxuriant. Hence I am to cross the Ashley river, and "sail out" as far as the old parish church of St. Andrew (the work of the early colonists), and, beyond, into the cotton plantations and " lovely "farm steads."

I am not either, to forget the great avenue from Charleston into the country, which is lined I with live oaks and huge flowering magnolias, j with tree myrtles, jessamines, and gardens of I flowers. I I am not vexed or chafed by seeing Venatico's eyes kindle and his chest heave, as he relates the repulse of Sir Peter Parker and the slaughter of Clinton's men.

For I sympathise with the Americans in that unjust war. Though I lament the blood my country then uselessly shed, I cannot but rejoice that an oppressed colony became free, and, by the freedom that it won, proved the right to freedom. Now we leave the seaward-looking houses, with the external green blinds to every window, and the trim gardens, so crowded of afternoons, and follow Venatico into the pleasant but narrow streets of Charleston.

Being of an historical and antiquarian turn of mind, he explains to me that in one respect his dear city is much inferior to other Southern cities. It has few squares ; there is one, I think, with a monument (as at Savannah), the reason of which defect — for "such defect cometh by cause" —  is that the city was originally (in 1670) laid out according to the plan furnished to the young i colonists from England.

The plan was a magnificent plan, doubtless, according to the lights of Charles the Second's architects (Wren could have had no hand in it, for he had grand Babylonian rectangular views on such matters), but now, in the full common-sense daylight of our modern time, the streets, though regular, look narrow, and the result is unsatisfactory.

But Charleston, in many ways, improves constantly. Repeated scourges of fire have taught the citizens not to rear houses of frail burnable plank, however cheap it may be ; and they now use good honest brick, as the Baltimore people do. Then the city is being loosely built ; 1 mean with plenty of room for ventilation between the houses ; and with large gardens. These gardens, and the huge verandas, like vast half-open external rooms, form the special characteristic features of Charleston. When I look up the great street in which Mill's Hotel is situated, I look up a street of gardens and detached houses. The verandas are of enormous size, and hang on to the walls by all sorts of contrivances : now from the first floor, now from the second, now resembling huge open-air conservatories, now real apartments, without any walls but trellised railings.

But Veuatico has a special object in guiding me by quiet by-streets of gardens towards the famous St. Michael's tower, famous in Charleston tradition. I have been expressing to him my astonishment and delight at seeing the real classic laurel growing wild in the pine-woods of Georgia, spreading green and immortal as when Apollo first plucked its leaves for a wreath in the forests round Parnassus.

Veuatico smiles at my enthusiasm, and with the true relying unselfish courtesy of a true American gentleman, offers to show me a peculiar species of flowering laurel, that grows to great perfection in Charleston, and in Charleston and. its district only.

Through some streets (as of an English country town), all silent and grave, and wearing a rather stern aristocratic aspect, and we reached the house we were in search of. There was the tree some thirty feet high, with green evergreen leaves, a profusion of flowers, and a pulpy red blood drop of a berry, with which it had besprinkled the road. Still it was not what we English call the laurel ; and, indeed, for flowers and trees, as well as for beasts and birds, the Americans have quite a different nomenclature. The tree was not half as beautiful either, as the huge magnolia trees I had seen growing round New Orleans, where their vast bushes of pink flowers shine out like colossal roses in the twilight ; but still its very existence seemed to realise to me at once the far southern country I was in, more than all else I had seen ; and even still more did I feel this in one of the more busy I streets when I suddenly came to a tropical looking palmetto-tree growing through a square orifice in the pavement just opposite a hard ware shop. The dead saplings covered with sheets of tin-tacks (where tiles have been fastened) I had been accustomed to, even in the Broadway of New York : where, indeed, there is a legend that one last slump still exists ; but a palm in an European city — yea, in the very streets — was a novelty.

Yet there it stood, grazed by cart-wheels and dusty with environing traffic, a palm-tree of the tropics ; its trunk sheathed, fold on fold, and its fan-like leaves, as I had seen them, mere bushes, in the swamps round Lake Pontchartrain. " How can we expect to find cold, phlegmatic, staid, calculating, dollar-loving people," thought I, " in a burning region where the palmetto grows in the streets, and where folks cat green peppers at dinner ?"

But I have no room to describe all the Charleston sights that Venatico took me to see. I particularly rejoiced, however, in the old houses, for it is not in many parts of America you can see houses old enough to boast of ghosts or legends. There is the St. Michael's Church, with the much-admired tower aforesaid; the old Custom-house, where the patriots were imprisoned— a place with really a gloomy dignity above it ; and the State House, now employed for the courts of justice, a massy building. The new Custom-house is all of marble, and, though monotonous, is not without beauty; as for the churches, they are all creditable — two of them, St. Finsbar (who knows anything of this saint's antecedents?), a Catholic church, boasts a tower like that of St. Philip's (Episcopalian), and there is a Baptist church with a spire more than two hundred feet high. This is the country where all creeds meet.

The Charleston people, Venatico told me, i in the days we spent together visiting these places, are proud of their public charities, especially the South Carolina, Fellowship, Hibernian, Hebrew, German, &c, all of which have large endowments and fine central buildings. Their College Museum stands all but first in the United States. The College Library boasts ten thousand volumes; the Charleston, thirty thousand ; the Apprentices, twelve thousand. Both the Library and Medical College are also much esteemed. The Orphan Asylum, too, is a great "lion" for those people of the two Carolinas who visit Charleston. It contains nearly two hundred and fifty orphans — half boys, half girls ; and dread King Yellow Fever finds it abundant inmates.

I conversed also with many of the students, to whom Venatico introduced me, from the Military Academy in the citadel. They seemed smart well-dressed lads, with a sort of French vivacity about them, not un- mingled with chivalrous impulses. This academy is a state institution ; half its hundred and eighty members are beneficiary. The system of education is borrowed, partly from the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris, and partly from the admirable Military Training School at West Point, on the Hudson. The graduates are the best taught and the moat successful young officers of the day. As I looked at them, and heard their stories as we sat over our Lager-beer, I prayed God to keep their lives for nobler purposes than to be squandered at the cannon s mouth in a fratricidal civil war.