lack alluvium rose an area of higher
land, upon which were situated the mansion and village of Governor
Aiken, where he, in 1830, commenced his duties as rice-planter. A hedge
of bright green casino surrounded the well-kept garden, within which
magnolias and live-oaks enveloped the solid old house, screening it with
their heavy foliage from the strong winds of the ocean, while flowering
shrubs of all descriptions added their bright and vivid coloring to the
picturesque beauty of the scene.

The governor had arrived at Jehossee before me, and Saturday being
pay-day, the faces of the negroes were wreathed in smiles. Here, in
his quiet island home, I remained until Monday with this most
excellent man and patriot, whose soul had been tried as by fire
during the disturbances caused by the war.

As we sat together in that room where, in years gone by, Governor
Aiken had entertained his northern guests, with Englishmen of noble
blood,--a room full of reminiscences both pleasant and painful,--my
kind host freely told me the story of his busy life, which sounded
like a tale of romance. He had tried to stay the wild storm of
secession when the war-cloud hung gloomily over his state. It broke,
and his unheeded warnings were drowned in the thunders of the
political tempest that swept over the fair south. Before the war he
owned one thousand slaves. He organized schools to teach his negroes
to read and write. The improvement of their moral condition was his
great study.

The life he had entered upon, though at first distasteful, had been
forced upon him, and he met his peculiar responsibilities with a true
Christian desire to benefit all within his reach. When a young man,
having returned from the tour of Europe, his father presented him with
Jehossee Island, an estate of five thousand acres, around which it
required four stout negro oarsmen to row him in a day. "Here," said
the father to the future governor of South Carolina, as he presented
the domain to his son,--"here are the means; now go to work and
develop them."

William Aiken applied himself industriously to the task of improving the
talents given him. His well-directed efforts bore good fruit, as year
after year Jehossee Island, from a half submerged, sedgy, boggy waste,
grew into one of the finest rice-plantations in the south. The new lord
of the manor ditched the marshes, and walled in his new rice-fields with
dikes, to keep out the freshets from the upland and the