places, are proud of their public charities,
especially the South Carolina,  Fellowship, Hibernian,
Hebrew, German, &c., all of which have
endowments and line 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 unmingled
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 most 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.

CONCERNING DINING.

"SIR!" said the great Dictionary maker, in
his own surly and deliciously dogmatic way of
putting down a truth as though he were
willing to do battle for it at so many pounds a
side—"SIR! I LIKE TO DRINK!''

No doubt the glasses jingled noisily as the
great palm was brought down with loud bang
upon the table, thus driving home that rough
tenpenny nail of a proposition: "SIR! I LIKE
T0 DINE!"

See how much may be behind so simple a
text. A pregnant aphorism, truly!—a precious
apophthegm after the Rochefoucault manner,
croak the smaller snarlers; and yet I will venture
to say that there was in the lexicographer's
mind, not so much a mere complacent annunciation
that he found satisfaction in the pure
repletion of his own proper stomach, but a sort
of protest, a loud reassertion as it were, of a
mighty principle fallen into desuetude. There
are seasons when pure truisms become exalted
into the axioms of a faith. They have to be
proclaimed abroad noisily, with the brazenness
that belongs only to established conclusions. It
is plain there were schismatics in his day who
did not dine—who, at least, found no relish in
that enjoyment—and who preached it down as
a nuisance, necessary perhaps, and almost
unavoidable, but still to be pruned and curtailed,
and in practice nullified. So may obstructive
judge or magistrate clog the wheels of a useful
act of parliament. They strove, no doubt, to
bring what he would have called respectable
deglutition into contempt. It was a waste of
precious hours, a making a deity of a particular
organ of the person. No wonder, then, that the
brave lexicographer bursts into his generous
remonstrance, Sir, I like to dine! Sir, whether
these heresiarchs shall prevail, and ultimately
bring about abolition of the familiar sedentary
meal, substituting in its room a sort of run-and-
read-and-eat movement, mere succulent joys
snatched hurriedly (and standing) at a sideboard,
worse even than that insecurity of viands
rife at the supper-table, and very much akin to
that five minutes allowed here for refreshment
at the railway counter, still, whatever be the
result, SIR! I LIKE TO DINE!

That miserable heresy fell back from the huge
rock. Those rotten branches were lopped away,
and the old true and pure principles prevailed.
Not alone, surely, oh great lexicographer, in
that enunciation! no monopoly in thy unctuous
relish of that daily meal! Still lives in
our own times that holy faith, with a trusting
belief, a firm clinging to that creed which holds
affectionately by the altar of the dinner-table,
and which neither scoffs nor persecutions have
been able to eradicate. Little ones at their
mother's knee lisp out a plaintive aspiration for
their noonday manna, and as they wax old and
stronger, drink in a yet firmer adherence to the
great palladium of nutrition. The brave men
and women of England—shall we say Old England?
—cherish this precious inheritance along
with Habeas Corpus, Magna Charta, Trial by
Jury, and the other immortal elements of our
glorious constitution. It is not to be torn up—
it is imperishably implanted in our hearts; and
so we shall marry, be born, bury, be elected into
vestry and parliament, and dine, unto the end!

In those remote early days when we all lived
among the trees in a delightful freedom, and in
what is called a state of nature, and went out
sporting every day in a light hunting uniform of
a few leaves strung together, and returned home
late, very much fagged, and with our savage
blood well up, taking it well out of those persons
who waited on us, and whom we called our
squaws—after this cheerful pastime, we did not,
properly so to speak, dine—we only ate. Appetite
being whetted by the day's exertion, we
were in the habit of flinging ourselves on our
victuals with a fierce competition, rending it, for
the sake of expedition, with skilful lingers, and
dispensing with superfluous aid of knife and
fork and general dinner-service. There was an
internal craving very clamorous, and the sole
aim in view was to stay by all speedy means an
importunity too long resisted. Usually, we did
not wait for the slower process which the degeneracy
of modern days has introduced among
its artificial wants connoisseurs among us holding
that the flavour and relish is only impaired
by the extraction of those juices to which civilised
times have so unaccountable a repugnance.
We had no tolerance for succession in the order
of our repast, but took our food in unseemly
junks, simultaneously and promiscuously from