oultrie. The
volunteers, aided by negroes and even negro women, worked all night on
the batteries. Notwithstanding we were close upon race-week, when the
city is usually crowded, the streets had a deserted air, and nearly
every acquaintance I met told me he had been down to the islands to
see the preparations. Yet the whole excitement, like others which had
preceded, ended even short of smoke. News came that reinforcements had
not been sent to Anderson; and the destruction of that most inconvenient
person was once more postponed. People fell back on the old hope that
the Government would be brought to listen to reason,--that it would
give up to South Carolina what it could not keep from her with justice,
--that it would grant, in short, the incontrovertible right of peaceable
secession. For, in the midst of all these labors and terrors, this
expense and annoyance, no one talked of returning into the Union, and
all agreed in deprecating compromise.

Once more, this time in the James Adger, I set sail from Charleston. The
boat lost one tide, and consequently one day, because at the last
moment the captain found himself obliged to take out a South Carolina
clearance. As I passed down the harbor, I counted fourteen square-rigged
vessels at the wharves, and one lying at anchor, while three others had
just passed the bar, outward-bound, and two were approaching from the
open sea. Deterred from the Ship Channel by the sunken schooners, and
from Maffitt's Channel by the fate of the Columbia, we tried the Middle
Channel, and glided over the bar without accident.

"Sailing to Charleston is very much like going foreign," I said to a
middle-aged sea-captain whom we numbered among our passengers. "What
with heaving the lead, and doing without beacons, and lying off the
coast o' nights, it makes one think of trading to new countries."

I had, it seems, unintentionally pulled the string which jerked him.
Springing up, he paced about excitedly for a few moments, and then broke
out with his story.

"Yes,--I know it,--I know as much about it as anybody, I reckon. I lay
off there nine days in a nor'easter and lost my anchors; and here I am
going on to New York to buy some more; and all for those cursed Black
Republicans!"

In South Carolina they see but one side of the shield,--which is quite
different, as we know, from the custom of the rest of mankind.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

1. _Descriptive Ethnology._ By R.G. L