There are also people who regret the dissolution of the Union—such as Mr. Huger, who shed tears in talking of it the other night; but they regard the fact very much as they would the demolition of some article which never can be restored and reunited, which was valued for the uses it rendered and its antiquity.
General Beauregard is apprehensive of an attack by the Northern “fanatics” before the South is prepared, and he considers they will carry out coercive measures most rigorously. He dreads the cutting of the levées, or high artificial works, raised along the whole course of the Mississippi, for many hundreds of miles above New Orleans, which the Federals may resort to in order to drown the plantations and ruin the planters.
We had a good-humoured argument in the evening about the ethics of burning the Norfolk navy yard. The Southerners consider the appropriation of the arms, moneys, and stores of the United States as rightful acts, inasmuch as they represent, according to them, their contribution, or a portion of it, to the national stock in trade. When a State goes out of the Union she should be permitted to carry her forts, armaments, arsenals, &c., along with her, and it was a burning shame for the Yankees to destroy the property of Virginia at Norfolk. These ideas, and many like them, have the merit of novelty to English people, who were accustomed to think there were such things as the Union and the people of the United States.
April 26th.—Bade good-by to Charleston at 9·45 A.M. this day, and proceeded by railway, in company with Mr. Ward, to visit Mr. Trescot’s Sea Island Plantation. Crossed the river to the terminus in a ferry steamer. No blockading vessels in sight yet. The water alive with small silvery fish, like mullet, which sprang up and leaped along the surface incessantly. An old gentleman, who was fishing on the pier, combined the pursuit of sport with instruction very ingeniously by means of a fork of bamboo in his rod, just above the reel, into which he stuck his inevitable newspaper, and read gravely in his cane-bottomed chair till he had a bite, when the fork was unhitched and the fish was landed. The negroes are very much addicted to the contemplative man’s recreation, and they were fishing in all directions.
On the move again. Took our places in the Charleston and Savannah Railway for Pocotaligo, which is the station for Barnwell Island. Our fellow-passengers were all full of politics—the pretty women being the fiercest of all—no! the least good-looking were the most bitterly patriotic, as if they hoped to talk themselves into husbands by the most unfeminine expressions towards the Yankees.
The country is a dead flat, perforated by rivers and water-courses, over which the rail is carried on long and lofty trestle-work. But for the fine trees, the magnolias and live oak, the landscape would be unbearably hideous, for there are none of the quaint, cleanly, delightful villages of Holland to relieve the monotonous level of rice-swamps and wastes of land and water and mud. At the humble little stations there were invariably groups of horsemen waiting under the trees, and ladies with their black nurses and servants who had driven over in the odd-looking old-fashioned vehicles, which were drawn up in the shade. Those who were going on a long journey, aware of the utter barrenness of the land, took with them a viaticum and bottles of milk. The nurses and slaves squatted down by their side in the train, on perfectly well-understood terms. No one objected to their presence—on the contrary, the passengers treated them with a certain sort of special consideration, and they were on the happiest terms with their charges, some of which were in the absorbent condition of life, and dived their little white faces against the tawny bosom of their nurses with anything but reluctance.
The train stopped, at 12·20, at Pocotaligo; and there we found Mr. Trescot and a couple of neighbouring planters, famous as fishers for “drum,” of which more by-and-bye. I had met old Mr. Elliot in Charleston, and his account of this sport, and of the pursuit of an enormous sea monster called the devil-fish, which he was one of the first to kill in these waters, excited my curiosity very much. Mr. Elliot has written a most agreeable account of the sports of South Carolina, and I had hoped he would have been well enough to have been my guide, philosopher, and friend in drum fishing in Port Royal; but he sent over his son to say that he was too unwell to come, and had therefore dispatched most excellent representatives in two members of his family. It was arranged that they should row down from their place and meet us to-morrow morning at Trescot’s Island, which lies above Beaufort, in Port Royal Sound and river.
Got into Trescot’s gig, and plunged into a shady lane with wood on each side, through which we drove for some distance. The country, on each side and beyond, perfectly flat—all rice lands—few houses visible—scarcely a human being on the road—drove six or seven miles without meeting a soul. After a couple of hours or so, I should think, the gig turned up by an open gateway on a path or road made through a waste of rich black mud, “glorious for rice,” and landed us at the door of a planter, Mr. Heyward, who came out and gave us a most hearty welcome, in the true Southern style. His house is charming, surrounded with trees, and covered with roses and creepers, through which birds and butterflies are flying. Mr. Heyward took it as a matter of course that we stopped to dinner, which we were by no means disinclined to do, as the day was hot, the road was dusty, and his reception frank and kindly. A fine specimen of the planter man; and, minus his broad-brimmed straw hat and loose clothing, not a bad representative of an English squire at home.
Whilst we were sitting in the porch, a strange sort of booming noise attracted my attention in one of the trees. “It is a rain-crow,” said Mr. Heyward; “a bird which we believe to foretell rain. I’ll shoot it for you.” And, going into the hall, he took down a double-barreled fowling-piece, walked out, and fired into the tree; whence the rain-crow, poor creature, fell fluttering to the ground and died. It seemed to me a kind of cuckoo—the same size, but of darker plumage. I could gather no facts to account for the impression that its call is a token of rain.