weary steed to manifest symptoms of dissatisfaction which could not be mistaken, a kind Providence sent a fellow-being along my path, in the shape of the most hideous, tattered, and wo-begone negro I had ever seen my first specimen of a plantation servant. The poor fellow's face and garments, however, sadly belied him; for upon my salutation of 'Boy, good morning; can you tell me where I can find water for my horse?' he touched his rimless hat and most civilly replied:

'Oh, yes, Massa! dere is fine water just back ob you!' 'Back of me?' I replied.

Strange I did not see it!' and turning my horse to retrace the path, the negro discovered my greenness, and laughing, said:

'Why, Massa, you 'ab no bucket to water de horse!' 'Bucket?' I inquired in astonishment!

you mean, boy? What do you mean?'

Bucket? What do

The poor fellow could scarcely contain his gravity, while he replied, pointing to the bottom of the. sulky: 'Sure, Massa 'ab no bucket! Massa no bin long in Carolina to tink water he horse widout bucket! Every body hab bucket on he carriage in Carolina !'

Here was indeed a perplexity of which I had never dreamed, and to extricate myself from which more than surpassed my share of even Yankee shrewdness. I could not think of driving fourteen long miles back to my morning resting-place in the heat of that torrid sun, nor of going forward the twelve miles to my first stopping place on the Georgetown road; and yet, from all the information I could gain from the negro, these seemed the only conditions upon which horse or driver were ever again to meet with the proprieties of civilized existence. In utter despair I looked up to my informer, with a respect I had never bestowed upon tattered garments before, and asked: Boy, what am I to do?'

'Don' know, Massa! Neber see a carriage wid'out bucket afore! Don' know, Massa!'

Though my informant had hitherto evidently been greatly amused at my perplexity, the despair of my countenance, or his pity for the jaded beast, now awakened his sympathies; and after scratching his head-a manipulation which the negro invariably performs when he is in trouble - he suddenly rolled the whites of his great eyes up to me and said with quickness, ' Me tink now, Massa! Me tink how Massa water he horse!' and plunging into the woods, presently returned with his hat filled with water. It was a capital thought, and the promptitude of its execution would have done honor to a Connecticut pedler. My dilemma was over; the negro's hat of water was a goblet of ambrosia to my steed; and the tattered son of Ham became in my eyes fair as a messenger of the gods.

Between the Ashly and Santee rivers, a distance of more than thirty miles, there are upon the main thoroughfare but three dwelling-houses. Upon the banks of the latter, one begins first to see something of the wealth of the Carolina rice-plantations. For many miles up and down the North and South Santee rivers, which

are here separated but a single mile, are cultivated those deep, rich bottoms, annually flowed and inexhaustible in resource, which are the glory of the State. The lordly owners of these manors pass the winter months in superintending the affairs of the homesteads, gathering about them all those luxuries which minister to ease and pleasure, of which none better understand the value, or select with more taste, than do these descendants of king Charles's cavaliers, and entering with a zeal and alacrity into those rural sports which are the zest and glory of a southern country life. Finer horsemen, more skilled marksmen, on the plain or in the forest, hardier frames for pugilistic feats, or a quicker eye and prompter hand for a game at fence, the world cannot produce. They are generally men also of liberal learning and generous dispositions; frank, hospitable, and courteous; and, bating a tithe of that hot-blood chivalry upon which they are too apt to pride themselves, noble and humane in all their impulses.

One marks every where at the South the eminently kind relations which exist between master and servant. To every man born and bred upon the plantation, the negro seems essential, in a thousand respects with which a northerner can have no sympathy. I saw nothing of what we call prejudice against color in all my travels. In infancy the same nurse gives food and rest to her own child and to her master's; in childhood the same eye watches and the same hand alternately caresses and corrects them; they mingle their sports in boyhood; and through youth up to manhood there are ties which link them to each other by an affinity that no time or circumstances can destroy. An illiterate, rough planter, who was by no means remarkable for the kindness he showed his servants, said to me one day: 'I travelled last summer all over Iowa territory, and I did n't see a nigger in two months. To be sure I felt kind o' badly, but it could n't be helped; so I made the best of it, thinking all the time I should be home again bye and bye. Well, Sir, I got back again as far as Zanesville in 'Hio, where there was a gineral muster and a heap of people; and pretty soon I heard a banjo; thinks I, there's some of our folks, I know; and sure enough there was two niggers and a wench going it powerful; and the way I went up to 'em and got hold of their hands, and says I, How are you, my good fellows? how are you, girl?' and the way I shook and they shook, was a caution to abolitionists, I tell you?'

Georgetown District is the wealthiest portion of the State; but a more miserable collection of decayed wood domicils and filthy beer shops than are clustered together to make up the town, it would be difficult to find. Indeed, unlike the free States, the wealth of the South lies almost entirely in the country; the towns, unless Charleston form an exception, being made up of artizans and traders. The historical associations of Georgetown District are of great interest; and many of the localities, rendered famous by feats of valor during the war of our Revolution, are still pointed out. An old soldier, whom I met by accident at the ferry-house on the banks of the Pedee, conducted me to the spot where General Marion invited the

British officer to dinner - -a scene immortalized by the pencil of White. Marion had long contended against the enemies of his country at fearful odds, and though the poverty and daily diminution of his troops were not known to the British, yet to himself, through the whole of the first campaign in South Carolina, they were sources of great disquietude and alarm. He managed, however, by celerity of movement and a perfect knowledge of the country to keep the enemy's forces in constant fear, and now and then to obtain over detached bodies of troops a signal victory. It was after one of these sudden dashes upon a foraging party whom the British colonel had sent into the country, in which Marion had been even more successful than usual, that an officer was sent to his camp with a flag of truce to propose an exchange of prisoners. Marion received him in the woods, negotiated the terms upon which the exchange should be made, passed the writings necessary for the purpose, and, after concluding all the preliminaries, invited the officer to dine with him. The invitation was accepted, and Marion, leading the way still farther into the forest, took his seat upon a log near which a watch-fire was burning, and invited the officer to do the same. Presently a negro appeared, and, raking open the ashes, uncovered a batch of roasted potatoes, which he presented upon a board, first to the stranger, and then to his master. apologies were offered for the meagre fare, and after the dinner was over, the officer departed with his flag. It is said that upon regaining his own lines, he forthwith threw up his commission, on the ground that it was hopeless to contend with an enemy who required no shelter but that of the forest trees, and no food but roasted potatoes.

No

As you advance inland from Georgetown, and begin to enter the cotton country, the scenery is completely changed. The huge live oaks, draperied with moss, the peculiar characteristic of the sickly lowlands, all disappear, and with them depart nearly all the evidences of wealth or taste or refinement. Instead of princely mansions surrounded by old parks and highly cultivated plantations, one sees nothing but low, piazza'd domicils, in fields bare of vegetation. and the appendage of miserable hovels scattered at short distances here and there for the field-hands. In the low country the rank growth upon the marshes affords some compensation for the want of green fields of grass; but in the up country every shade of greenness is lost in the interminable red clay-fields which spread out every where around you. It was new to me that the upland grasses could not be cultivated below Virginia, but so it is. Every where, by the road side, in the court-yard, over the fenced fields, and in the forest, the bosom of mother earth is bared before you; and to one accustomed to the green mantle with which she robes herself in New England, the sight is almost shocking. Equally so was another sight, with which, however, I soon became familiar, but which at the outset startled my sense of decency to a degree; I refer to the nudity of the young negroes. Up to ten and eleven years of age, the colored children of both sexes run about entirely naked; and in the

more secluded plantations they may be seen at even a later age, without a fig-leaf of covering to their jetty limbs. I beg my friends, the abolitionists, will not set this down as a new instance of the cruelty of the masters, as I had repeated and indubitable evidence of its being a habit of such determinate choice upon the part of the children, as to defy every effort to break it up. That it manifests the state of utter degradation to which the slaves are reduced, I do not deny; for every where, in low-land and high-land, country and city, nothing is more evident than the mental and moral degradation of the negro.

As the value of the lands and the wealth of the inhabitants decrease, while you journey toward the back country, so also does the intelligence of the people. I never met in my whole life with so many white persons who could neither read nor write, who had never taken a newspaper, who had never travelled fifty miles from home, or who had never been to the house of God, or heard a sentence read from his Holy Word, as I found in a single season in South Carolina. Like the inhabitants of Nineveh, many of them could not discern between the right hand and the left. What wonder then that the hosts of Yankee pedlers, until driven out by the sumptuary laws, fattened upon the land! What do you think I gave for that?' asked an ignorant planter in Sumpter district, while pointing to a Connecticut wooden clock which stood upon a shelf in the corner of the room. 'I don't know,' was my answer; 'twenty dollars, or very likely twenty-five!' 'Twenty-five dollars, stranger!' replied the planter; why, what do you mean? Come, guess fair, and I'll tell you true!' I answered again, that twenty-five dollars was a high price for such a clock, as I had often seen them sold for a quarter of that sum. The man was astonished. Stranger,' said he, 'I gave one hundred and forty-four dollars for that clock, and thought I got it cheap at that! Let me tell you how it was. We had always used sun-dials hereabout, till twelve or fourteen years ago, when a man came along with clocks to sell. I thought at first I would n't buy one, but after haggling about the price for a while, he agreed to take sixteen dollars less than what he asked, for his selling price was one hundred and sixty dollars; and as I had just sold my cotton at thirty-four cents, I concluded to strike the bargain. It's a powerful clock, but I reckon I gave a heap of money for it!'

In fact, during those years when the staples of Carolina sold for nearly thrice their intrinsic value, and wealth flowed in an uninterrupted stream through every channel of industry, the plantations of the South became the legitimate plunder of Yankee shrewdness. It was no meeting of Greek with Greek in the contest of wits, but a perfect inrush of shrewd, disciplined tacticians in the art of knavery, upon a stupid and ignorant population. The whole country was flooded with itinerant hawkers. There is scarcely an article in the whole range of home manufactures upon which fortunes were not made during those times of inflated prices of the southern staple products. Through the mountain passes of Buncombe county there flowed a stream of pedlers' carts, wagons, carry-alls, and

arks, which inundated the land. Indeed, so great at length became the evil, and so overmatched in the contest of wits were the planters of the uplands, that the legislature passed laws forbidding a Yankee pedler to enter the State.

It is this deplorable ignorance, which is prevalent over a large portion of South Carolina, that constitutes the most insuperable obstacle to the removal of slavery. Among the more wealthy and intelligent of the population, juster sentiments prevail in regard to that great evil; but their opinions and wishes are greatly overbalanced by the masses of the middling classes. They, wedded to the customs of their fathers beyond all hope of improvement; vegetators upon the soil cleared and prepared by their ancestors; ignorant, idle, and overbearing; driven by thriftless modes of agriculture, and the impoverishing system of slave-labor, to penurious economy, and scouting every suggestion of manual toil as servile and degrading; they compose the great barrier around the institution of negro servitude, which the tide of public sentiment never reaches, and which the advancing intelligence of other portions of the world cannot soon affect. To them, hedged in by the antiquated prejudices of a barbarous age, alike unfitted to know and unwilling to receive the new truths of humanity and religion, the negro seems the connecting link between man and the brute. Of their own origin and destiny they know and care little; of him who toils for them, less; and it is vain to hope, until the States between them and the free people of the North shall have broken down the system which curses alike the owner and his soil, that the intelligence of an independent and virtuous people can ever reach them.

In these Sketches, which are now brought to a close, I have endeavored to represent the condition of South Carolina as I saw it. Of slavery I have said what I believe, and of its white population what I know to be true. There, as elsewhere in a world tainted by evil, injustice too often embitters the cup of life. But it is not the slave only, bending to his irksome task, nor he who toils under the heat of a southern sky alone, who drains it to its dregs. The chalice is commended to the lips every where. And deeply has the writer drank, from the hands of those who profess to be guided by the divine precepts of Christ, banded as they were to subvert oppression and wrong in southern institutions, a draft of injustice more poisonous than the bitterest potion of slavery.

TO

PLEASURE,

LIST a mortal's guest, sweet Pleasure!

Why so fleeting, answer, pray?

Lost as soon as found, thy treasure!
None can thy dear presence stay.

Thank thou Fate, she cried, whose minions,
All the gods, love me alone;

Were I fashioned without pinions,

They would keep me for their own!

W. P. P.