With the fresh breeze blowing in our faces, and the sun shining in our eyes, as only a Southern sun can shine, we step on board, and in another moment our brisk little convoy is dancing over the water like a joyous child released from school; it trembles and leaps like a living thing, and we almost fancy that its iron heart must be beating with a feeling of sentient enjoyment like our own.
All kinds and conditions of men are crowded round us—high and low, rich and poor; evidently we are all out for a holiday, and in the most perfect sang-froid fashion, and without the slightest ceremony, everybody talks to everybody else. A lady from the North sits beside me, and shading her complexion from the sun, softly drones into my ear her whole family history, from the birth of her first baby to the vaccination of her last. I learn that she is now travelling in search of health, and cannot find it—the farther she goes, the farther it flies from her.
“And yet,” she murmurs plaintively, “I know it must sometimes be quite near me, if I could only lay my hands upon it.” She talked of health as a thing to be caught on the “hold fast” or “let go” principle.
“It seems to be like a game of ‘hot boiled beans and butter,’” I remark somewhat flippantly, “only there is no one to tell you when you are growing ‘hot’ or ‘cold.’”
Why will people afflict their fellow-travellers with the history of their family troubles or personal ailments, and so indulge in a luxury which is even forbidden to hospital patients! Our sympathies cannot be worked like a fire-engine; it is impossible for the most sympathetic to pump up a sudden interest in Jeremiah’s gout or Matilda’s inward complications, especially when there are beautiful scenes and delicious airs around you, which you may have come thousands of miles to enjoy; but there are some people to whom nothing is attractive or interesting outside of that great ogre “self.”
With the exception of ourselves they were all Americans on board—men from the East, men from the West; some were for the first time making a tour through their own Southern States, but east and west, north and south, walked up and down the deck, side by side, fraternising in the most friendly fashion, chatting upon passing scenes, or talking quietly one with another, indulging in reminiscences of that long long ago, when the links of brotherhood had been for a time broken. Close by was an old man with a stubbly grey beard and a mangy fur cap, that looked like a drowned kitten tied round his head; he had gathered a few hoary-headed comrades round him, and they were talking of old days, fighting their battles over again, setting up their guns, and drawing plans upon the deck. So, as the future narrows and closes round us, we are driven to the past for comfort. Flashes of sentiment and scraps of conversation were floating round us, and the very air seemed impregnated with a subtle something that was new and strange to us. While looking round upon this pleasant peaceful scene, the white sails dipping and coquetting with their own shadow in the water, the soft green hills and the grim old forts beyond, all bathed in peaceful sunshine, it is impossible but the mind will travel back to the day when the air was filled with lurid battle smoke, and the cannon stationed all around the shore belched forth blazing fires, while a hundred hungry, angry tongues of flame leapt from their iron mouths. Just such a calm as this lay upon the city the day the first gun was fired, though the passions of men were brooding below like a strong and silent tide, which is soon to overflow and flood the nations. A Carolinian poet thus describes the scene, and the vivid picture is present to-day as it was then:—
“Calm as the second summer which precedes
The first fall of the snow,
In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds,
The city hides the foe.
As yet, behind their ramparts stern and proud,
Her bolted thunders sleep—
Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud,
Looms o’er the solemn deep.
No Calpe frowns from lofty cliff or scar,
To guard the holy strand;
But Moultrie holds in leash the dogs of war,
Above the level sand.”
We pass by “Sullivan Island,” girdled by its beach of golden sand, with a beadwork of white foam embroidered in living light fringing the shore, and its pretty homes surrounded by lovely gardens and farmsteads, and tall church steeples, gleaming in the sunshine. We have but a distant view of Fort Moultrie, which is a striking feature on the low-lying land, but we have no time to pay it a visit, our hearts and our eyes too are anchored on Fort Sumter, and thitherward our saucy vessel turns its head, a crazy plank is flung to the shore, and we land at last. Federals and confederates, foreigners and strangers, saunter on together.
There is little of the old fort standing; it is a ruin now—a grim picturesque rugged ruin, almost levelled to a mound of rock and sand; desolation, with its empty socketless eyes, stares from the narrow loopholes, where twenty years ago there flashed the fiery orbs of war. We descended, or rather scrambled, down a flight of broken steps—it seemed we were going into the bowels of the earth—peeped into what looked like dark, narrow graves, where the men used to lie, smothered and half stifled, while they worked their guns, and living through this death in life for four long years, they came out of their darkness to the light of the sun to find their martyrdom had been in vain—their cause was lost. But the gates are closed upon all these things, and God keeps the key.