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
firebrand 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, Legaré, Lowndes, Poinsett,
and other American celebrities. I am, this
steaming hot yellow-feverish morning, turning
my back on Savannah— one of the most
extraordinary 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
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 eyes 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 Bay,
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
nothing but advertisements of rewards for runaway
negroes, and offers of election lamps for night
processions, and political banners, I 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 and
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 Aerschott, 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