night; and the traveller should be prepared accordingly.
If he arrives by day, he will have seen some country houses, within the last few miles; houses surrounded by some sort of tillage, and most likely cotton. The piazzas which run round to the back may be either of decaying wood, unpainted and bare, or shaded with honeysuckles such as are never seen elsewhere,—large globes of luscious bloom,—and yellow jasmines, before whose blossoms the humming bird is stationary while sucking the sweets, poised on quivering wings. In the fences, the yucca appears,—the most northerly of the palm tribe; and the splendid Cherokee rose sprawls over hedge or rail, in long lines of blossom, here and there converging into a mass of flowers.
At length I arrive at Charleston. If by night, I perceive only that the streets are singularly quiet, underfoot and around. Underfoot is the deep sand still; and still liable to the holes which in the roads so aggravate the fatigue of travelling; and on the pavement nobody is to be seen or heard except the soldiers, who are never absent. The guarding of this city is as singular an illustration of eternal vigilance as could be found in any part of the world. The sense of security is absolutely unknown there; and the sleepless mood, and practice of suspicion and watchfulness, have become a second nature. If I am obliged to go to a hotel, from the lateness of the hour, I prepare for thorough discomfort. The negroes are lying asleep about the passages; the fires are out; no beds are ready, or none that a Yankee is disposed to try. I may have a draught of liquor, but there is nothing else; so I wait in the saloon for morning,
If I enter by day, it is a very different affair. I walk from the station to my brother-in-law’s house. There is an oriental air about the place very striking to a man from spruce, bright New England. The buildings have a hue of age, from the heat and moisture of the climate. The sandy streets in which no footfall is heard; the mulatto women, carrying water-pots or baskets of fruit on their turbaned heads; the tropical vegetation of the scattered gardens, and the precautions to secure shade everywhere, remind travelled men of oriental countries. The influence seems to have spread into the minds of the residents, if I may judge from some of the conversation I hear. One gentleman, who is a sort of social oracle in the city, has told me with complacency, more than once, that South Carolina society is “rapidly advancing towards Orientalism,” pointing out to me as evidence the increasing discountenance of any sort of useful employment among ladies, their growing fastidiousness, and the exclusiveness which proscribes literature that is not of native growth, and the tightening restrictions which fence about the mind and manners of South Carolina. Since my last trip thither, I have seen in several southern newspapers a characteristic paragraph. Some New England, or perhaps Old England, newspaper had announced the fact that Lady Byron had left a legacy to Mr. Follen, of Boston, as an assistance to him in the difficulties he might encounter as an abolitionist. At the end of this paragraph, the Southern papers inserted the observation that they could assure her ladyship (some time deceased) that if the South had been aware of her ladyship’s abolition tendencies, her husband’s poetry would not have obtained that currency which it had enjoyed in that region of refinement. I need not show English readers the points of this notice which must be intensely amusing to them.
But it is time I was arriving at my sister’s house.
These Yankee hostesses certainly make their guests more comfortable than the native ladies can do: but it is at great cost. The native ladies let things slide, as we say in America. If they can carry a point by one effort they do it; if not, they yield it. If they can get an order obeyed by reasonable endeavours, they do so; but if not, they yield again. The northern wives, to whom time, comfort, and a sense of achievement and success are necessaries of life, are apt to fret and fidget. The astonishing patience of the southern gentry,—not conspicuous in Congress, certainly, but truly amazing in their own homes,—is a virtue beyond the reach of most Yankees ; but, as a set off, the house of a northern mistress is cleaner, the beds are better made, the meals are somewhat more punctual, the negroes less wheedling and wilful;—in short, daily life goes on less languidly and with less disorder ; and the good manners of the northern guest are less severely tried. I own, however, that one thing that I do dread in paying these visits is the besetting nuisance of the servants. When one wakes in the morning there are their black faces, one at each bed-post, staring at one; and it is no easy matter to get them out of the room at all. They are apt to be offended at being sent away ; whereas the real insult is in the license permitted them as inferior beings. They are allowed liberties in common with the dog, the cat, and the canary. I never could reconcile myself to the domestic habits existing where the servants are slaves; but all sense of the distastefulness to myself is lost in the concern I cannot but feel for the children of the household. No attempt is made to separate them from the negroes. The thing could not be done. Their nurses are negroes; their playfellows are negroes; and what they hear from these companions is, in regard to the moralities and decencies of life, much what the dog and the cat would say, if they could speak. Among themselves the negroes have the same inborn decorums that other people have,—the same native purity. I could give a hundred illustrations of this. But the whites who treat them as another order of beings, place themselves out of the reach of the instincts which render the blacks decorous in their own homes, and must not wonder at anything the children may hear from “body-servant” or playmate. I am sure this is the worst of the many troubles inflicted on mothers by the “peculiar institution.” My sisters struggled with it for a time, endeavouring to keep their little ones always with them: but that did not much mend the matter. Negroes will talk ; and the affair always ends in leaving the children to their chance, in the hope that their innocence may be their safeguard.
After getting up from my hard bed—truly as hard as the table, as it should be in a hot climate