that runs by it is called Cape Fear river; above, on the opposite shore, lies Mount Misery,-and heaven-forsaken enough seemed place and people to me. How good one should be to live in such places! How heavenly would one's thoughts and imaginations of hard necessity become, if one existed in Wilmington, North Carolina! The afternoon was beautiful, golden, mild, and bright,-the boat we were in extremely comfortable and clean, and the captain especially courteous. The whole furniture of this vessel was remarkably tasteful, as well as convenient, not forgetting the fawn-coloured and blue curtains to the berths.

By the by, what a deplorable mistake it is-be-draperying up these narrow nests, so as to impede the poor meagre mouthfuls of air which their dimensions alone necessarily limit one to. These crimson and yellow, or even fawn-coloured and blue silk suffocators, are a poor compensation for free ventilation; and I always look at these elaborate adornments of sea-beds as ingenious and elegant incentives to sea-sickness, graceful emetics in themselves, all provocation from the waters set aside. The captain's wife and ourselves were the only passengers; and, after a most delightful walk on deck in the afternoon, and comfortable tea, we retired for the night, and did not wake till we bumped on the Charleston bar on the morning of Christmas-day.

The William Seabrook, the boat which is to convey us from hence to Savannah, only goes once a-week, and we shall therefore be compelled to remain here till Friday. This unfrequent communication between the principal cities of the great southern states is rather a curious contrast to the almost unintermitting intercourse which goes on between the northern towns. The boat itself, too, is a species of small monopoly, being built and chiefly used for the convenience of certain wealthy planters residing on Eddisto Island, a small insulated tract between Charleston and Savannah, where the finest cotton that is raised in this country grows. This city is the oldest I have yet seen in America-I should think it must be the oldest in it. I cannot say that the first impression produced by the wharf at which we landed, or the streets we drove through in reaching our hotel, was particularly lively. Rickety, dark, dirty, tumble-down streets and warehouses, with every now and then a mansion of loftier pretensions, but equally neglected and ruinous in its appearance, would probably not have been objects of special admiration to many people on this side the water, but I belong to that infirm, decrepit, bed-ridden old country, England; and must acknowledge, with a blush for the stupidity of the prejudice, that it is so very long since I have seen anything old, that the lower streets of Charleston, in all their dinginess and decay, were a refreshment and a rest to my spirit.

I have had a perfect red-brick-and-white-board fever ever since I came to this country; and once more to see a house which looks as if it had stood long enough to get warmed through, is a balm to my senses, oppressed with newness. Boston had two or three fine old dwelling-houses, with antique gardens and old-fashioned court-yards; but they have come down to the dust before the improving spirit of the age. And as for Philadelphia, a house owns, and which has actually been built fifty years, is, I believe, the most ancient private tenement in it; and no day passes that I do not hear it reviled for an old brick Methuselah, that should be made to cease cumbering the ground. One would think, to hear the people talk, that after ten years

a house gets weak in the knees. Perhaps these houses do; but I have lodged under roof-trees that have stood hundreds of years, and may stand hundreds more-marry, they have good foundations.

In walking about Charleston, I was forcibly reminded of some of the older country towns in England-of Southampton a little. The appearance of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other of the American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, 'tis a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the spruce citizen rattling by the faded splendours of an old family-coach in his new-fangled chariot-they certainly have got on before it. Charleston has an air of eccentricity, too, and peculiarity, which formerly were not deemed unbecoming the well-born and wellbred gentlewoman, which her gentility itself sanctioned and warranted -none of the vulgar dread of vulgar opinion, forcing those who are possessed by it to conform to a general standard of gentility, unable to conceive one peculiar to itself. This "What 'll-Mrs.-Grundy-say" devotion to conformity in small things and great, which pervades the American body-social from the matter of church-going to the trimming of women's petticoats,-this dread of singularity, which has eaten up all individuality amongst them, and makes their population like so many moral and mental lithographs, and their houses like so many thousand hideous brick-twins

I believe I am getting excited; but the fact is, that being politically the most free people on earth, the Americans are socially the least so; and it seems as though, ever since that little affair of establishing their independence among nations, which they managed so successfully, every American mother's son of them has been doing his best to divest himself of his own private share of that great public blessing, liberty.

But to return to Charleston. It is in this respect a far more aristocratic (should I not say democratic?) city than any I have yet seen in America, inasmuch as every house seems built to the owner's particular taste; and in one street you seem to be in an old English town, and in another in some continental city of France or Italy. This variety is extremely pleasing to the eye; not less so is the intermixture of trees with the building, almost every house being adorned, and gracefully screened, by the beautiful foliage of evergreen shrubs. These, like ministering angels, cloak with nature's kindly ornaments the ruins and decays of the mansions they surround; and the latter, time-mellowed, (I will not say stained, and a painter knows the dif ference,) harmonize in their forms and colouring with the trees, in a manner most delightful to an eye that knows how to appreciate this species of beauty.

There are several public buildings of considerable architectural pretensions in Charleston, all of them apparently of some antiquity, (for the New World,) except a very large and handsome edifice which is not yet completed, and which, upon inquiry, we found was intended for a guard-house. Its very extensive dimensions excited our surprise; but a man who was at work about it, and who answered —'s questions with a good deal of intelligence, informed us that it was by no means larger than the necessities of the city required; for that they

not unfrequently had between fifty and sixty persons (coloured and white) brought in by the patrol in one night.'

'But,' objected, the coloured people I thought were not allowed to go out without passes after nine o'clock.'

'Yes,' replied our informant, but they will do it, nevertheless; and every night numbers are brought in who have been caught endeavouring to evade the patrol.'

This explained to me the meaning of a most ominous tolling of bells and beating of drums, which, on the first evening of my arrival in Charleston, made me almost fancy myself in one of the old fortified frontier towns of the Continent, where the tocsin is sounded, and the evening drum beaten, and the guard set as regularly every night as if an invasion were expected. In Charleston, however, it is not the dread of foreign invasion, but of domestic insurrection, which occasions. these nightly precautions; and for the first time since my residence in this free country, the curfew (now obsolete in mine, except in some remote districts, where the ringing of an old church-bell at sunset is all that remains of the tyrannous custom) recalled the associations of early feudal times, and the oppressive insecurity of our Norman conquerors. But truly it seemed rather anomalous hereabouts, and nowa-days; though, of course, it is very necessary where a large class of persons exist in the very bosom of a community whose interests are known to be at variance and incompatible with those of its other members. And no doubt these daily and nightly precautions are but trifling drawbacks upon the manifold blessings of slavery, (for which, if the reader is stupid, and cannot conceive them, see the late Governor M'Duffy's speeches ;) still I should prefer going to sleep, without the apprehension of my servants' cutting my throat in my bed, even to having a guard provided to prevent their doing so. However, this peculiar prejudice of mine may spring from the fact of my having known many instances in which servants were the trusted, and most trustworthy friends of their employers, and entertaining, besides, some odd notions of the reciprocal duties of all the members of families, one towards the other.

The extreme emptiness which I observed in the streets, and absence of everything like bustle or business, is chiefly owing to the season, which the inhabitants of Charleston, with something akin to old English feeling, generally spend in hospitable festivity upon their estates; a goodly custom, at least to my mind. It is so rare for any of the wealthier people to remain in town at Christmas, that poor Miss who had come on with us to pay a visit to some friends, was not a little relieved to find that they were (contrary to their custom) still in the city. I went to take my usual walk this morning, and found that the good citizens of Charleston were providing themselves with a most delightful promenade upon the river, a fine, broad, well-paved esplanade, of considerable length, open to the water on one side, and on the other overlooked by some very large and picturesque old houses, whose piazzas, arches, and sheltering evergreens reminded me of buildings in the vicinity of Naples. This delightful walk is not yet finished, and I fear, when it is, it will be little frequented; for the southern women, by their own account, are miserable pedestrians,-of which fact, indeed, I had one curious illustration to-day; for I received a visit from a young lady residing in the same street where we lodged, who came in her carriage, a distance of less than a quarter of a mile, to call upon

me.

It is impossible to conceive anything funnier, and at the same time more provokingly stupid, dirty, and inefficient, than the tribe of black-faced heathen divinities and classicalities, who make believe to wait upon us here,-the Dianas, Phillises, Floras, Cæsars, et cetera, who stand grinning in wonderment and delight round our table, and whom I find it impossible, by exhortation or entreaty, to banish from the room, so great is their amusement and curiosity at my outlandish mode of proceeding. (I presume it must be me, as Mr. is native, and to the manner born.) This morning, upon my entreating them not to persist in waiting upon us at breakfast, they burst into an ungovernable titter, and withdrawing from our immediate vicinity, kept poking their woolly heads and white grinders in at the door every five minutes, keeping it conveniently open for that purpose.

A fine large new hotel was among the buildings which the late fire at Charleston destroyed, and the house where we now are is the best at present in the city. It is kept by a very obliging and civil colouredwoman, who seems extremely desirous of accommodating us to our minds; but her servants, (they are her slaves, in spite of her and their common complexion) would defy the orderly genius of the superintendent of the Astor House. Their laziness, their filthiness, their inconceivable stupidity, and unconquerable good-humour, are enough to drive one stark-staring mad. The sitting-room we occupy is spacious, and not ill-furnished, and especially airy, having four windows, and a door, none of which can or will shut. We are fortunately rid of that familiar fiend of the north, the anthracite coal, but do not enjoy the luxury of burning wood. Bituminous coal, such as is generally used in England, is the combustible preferred here; and all my national predilections cannot reconcile me to it, in preference to the bril liant, cheerful, wholesome, poetical warmth of a wood fire. Our bedrooms are dismal dens, open to 'a' the airts the wind can blaw,' halffurnished, and not by any means half clean. The furniture itself is old, and very infirm,-the tables all peach with one or other leg,—the chairs are most of them minus one or two bars, the tongs cross their feet when you attempt to use them,—and one poker travels from room to room, that being our whole allowance for two fires.

We have had occasion to make only two trifling purchases since we have been here; but the prices (if these articles are any criterion) must be infinitely higher than those of the northern shopkeepers; but this we must expect as we go further south, for, of course, they have to pay double profits upon all the commonest necessaries of life, importing them, as they do, from distant districts. I must record a curious observation of's, on her return from church, Tuesday morning. She asked me if the people of this place were not very proud? I was struck with the question, as coinciding with a remark sometimes made upon the south, and supposed by some far-fetching cause-hunters to have its origin in some of their 'domestic institutions.' I told her that I knew no more of them than she did; and that I had had no opportunity of observing whether they were or not.

'Well,' she replied, I think they are, for I was in church early, and I observed the countenances and manner of the people as they came in, and they struck me as the haughtiest, proudest-looking people I ever saw.'

This very curious piece of observation of hers I note down without comment. I asked her if she had ever heard, or read, the remark as

applied to the southern people? She said, 'Never,' and I was much amused at this result of her physiognomical church speculations.

Last Thursday evening we left our hotel in Charleston for the steam-boat which was to carry us to Savannah; it was not to start until two in the morning; but, of course, we preferred going on board rather earlier, and getting to bed. The ladies' cabin, however, was so crowded with women and children, and so inconveniently small, that sleeping was out of the question in such an atmosphere. I derived much amusement from the very empress-like airs of an uncommonly handsome mulatto woman, who officiated as stewardess, but whose discharge of her duties appeared to consist in telling the ladies what they ought, and what they ought not to do, and lounging about with an indolent dignity, which was irresistibly droll, and peculiarly southern.

The boat in which we were, not being considered sea-worthy, as she is rather old, took the inner passage, by which we were two nights and a day accomplishing this most tedious navigation, creeping through cuts and small muddy rivers, where we stuck sometimes to the bottom, and sometimes to the banks, which presented a most dismal succession of dingy, low, yellow swamps, and reedy marshes, beyond expression wearisome to the eye. About the middle of the day on Friday, we touched at the island of Eddisto, where some of the gentlemen-passengers had business, that being the seat of their plantations, and where the several families reside-after the eldest member of which, Mr. -, the boat we were in was named.

Eddisto, as I have mentioned before, is famous for producing the finest cotton in America-therefore, I suppose, in the world. As we were to wait here some time, we went on shore to walk. The appearance of the cotton-fields at this season of the year was barren enough; but, as a compensation, I here, for the first time, saw the evergreen oak-trees (the ilex, I presume,) of the south. They were not very fine specimens of their kind, and disappointed me a good deal. The advantage they have of being evergreen is counterbalanced by the dark and almost dingy colour of the foliage, and the leaf being minute in size, and not particularly graceful in form. These trees appeared to me far from comparable, either in size or beauty, to the European oak, when it has attained its full growth. We were walking on the estate of one of the Mr.—s, which lay unenclosed on each side of what appeared to be the public road through the island.

At a short distance from the landing we came to what is termed a ginning-house-a building appropriated to the process of freeing the cotton from the seed. It appeared to be open to inspection; and we walked through it. Here were about eight or ten stalls on either side, in each of which a man was employed at a machine, worked like a turner's or knife-grinder's wheel, by the foot, which, as fast as he fed it with cotton, parted the snowy flakes from the little black first cause, and gave them forth soft, silky, clean, and fit to be woven into the finest lace or muslin. This cotton being noted for its beauty, was very desirous of securing some of the seed, and sent a request to Mr., asking leave to take a small quantity, which demand was complied with immediately, and without any limitation whatever. This same process of ginning is performed in many places, and upon

-'s own cotton-estate, by machinery; the objection to which, however, is, that the staple of the cotton-in the length of which consists its chief excellence is supposed by some planters to be injured, and the threads broken, by the substitution of an engine for the task per