ings, almost every house being
adorned, and gracefully screened, by the beautiful foliage of evergreen
shrubs. These, like ministering angels, cloak with nature's kindly
ornaments the ruins and decays of the mansions they surround; and the
latter, time-mellowed (I will not say stained, and a painter knows the
difference), harmonize in their forms and coloring with the trees, in a
manner most delightful to an eye that knows how to appreciate this
species of beauty.

There are several public buildings of considerable architectural
pretensions in Charleston, all of them apparently of some antiquity (for
the New World), except a very large and handsome edifice which is not
yet completed, and which, upon inquiry, we found was intended for a
guard-house. Its very extensive dimensions excited our surprise; but a
man who was at work about it, and who answered our questions with a good
deal of intelligence, informed us that it was by no means larger than
the necessities of the city required; for that they not unfrequently had
between fifty and sixty persons (colored and white) brought in by the
patrol in one night.

"But," objected we, "the colored people are not allowed to go out
without passes after nine o'clock."

"Yes," replied our informant, "but they will do it, nevertheless; and
every night numbers are brought in who have been caught endeavoring to
evade the patrol."

This explained to me the meaning of a most ominous tolling of bells and
beating of drums, which, on the first evening of my arrival in
Charleston, made me almost fancy myself in one of the old fortified
frontier towns of the Continent where the tocsin is sounded, and the
evening drum beaten, and the guard set as regularly every night as if an
invasion were expected. In Charleston, however, it is not the dread of
foreign invasion, but of domestic insurrection, which occasions these
nightly precautions; and, for the first time since my residence in this
free country, the curfew (now obsolete in mine, except in some remote
districts, where the ringing of an old church-bell at sunset is all that
remains of the tyrannous custom) recalled the associations of early
feudal times, and the oppressive insecurity of our Norman conquerors.
But truly it seemed rather anomalous hereabouts, and nowadays; though,
of course, it is very necessary where a large class of persons exists in
the very bosom of a community whose interests are known to be at
variance and incompat