ns, with houses on the seaboard or shores of the
river or inlets; a road circumscribing it, and one running across it.

We were welcomed by the appearance of two or three decently clad
house-servants, mulattoes, and an athletic negro, of average
nigritude,[2] every tooth in whose head glistened, as his black face
rippled into a laugh, when his master favored him with some familiar and
approving jocularity. Officiously taking charge of the horse and buggy,
he conveyed them to a spacious but dilapidated stable (the door of
which, I remarked, hung only by its lower hinge), while the servants
were equally zealous in transporting what little baggage we had into the
house. There the Colonel presented me to his daughters, two tall and
rather handsome girls of the ages of eighteen and twenty, dressed in
deep mourning (their mother had died but recently), their aunt, a staid,
elderly matron, who seemed installed as housekeeper, and a fat, careless
gentleman in shirt sleeves, with a cigar in his mouth, who impressed me
as an indolent and improvident poor relation of my host, as, indeed, he
proved. There was present, also, the child of a neighbor, a little
fair-haired girl, called Nelly, who, hearing my nationality mentioned,
would not approach me, which the Colonel accounted for by surmising that
she had received 'Tory' impressions of Britisher's from her parent's
negroes.

A sincere, if a quiet welcome, and an excellent dinner, comprising fish,
game, chickens, bacon, hominy, corn and wheaten bread, and sweet
potatoes of a succulence and flavor only attainable in Dixie, all served
by decorous and attentive negroes, made me feel very contented with my
position. Nor were the surroundings inharmonious. We sat by a wood fire,
burning in a fireplace which contained, instead of a grate,
old-fashioned iron dogs: most of the furniture, with the exception of a
handsome piano, was ancient, and the room ornamented with books,
pictures, and mineral curiosities. Among the former I noticed a row of
volumes of British parliamentary debates in old print, contemporary with
the age succeeding Johnson. Really, as my host had boasted, his
household gods were decidedly English--_colonial_ English; and I began
to understand the peculiar, ante-revolutionary, patrician
characteristics on which he and his class evidently prided themselves.
He showed me a portrait of an ancestor who had held high office in the
days of Governor Oglethorpe, an old-fashione