puffs and yet seems scarcely to move, out there
in the offing between Fort Sumter and Mount
Pleasant?

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 forward
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, her 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 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 rhapsodises 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