likewise be fain to
do. Now and then the stillness that reigned over that home of malign
things was broken by the sound of a boat-horn on a lumber raft
floating down the Edisto.

A song written by Simms chants the charms of a grapevine swing in the
festoons of which half a dozen guests could be seated at once, all on
different levels, book in one hand, leaving the other free to reach up
and gather the clusters of grapes as they read. After supper they sat
on the portico, from which they looked through a leafy archway formed
by the meeting of the branches of magnificent trees, and discussed
literature and metaphysics.

The Christmas guests at Woodlands would be awakened in early morning
by the sound of voice and banjo and, looking from their windows, could
see the master distributing gifts to his seventy dusky servitors. In
the evenings host and guests met in the spacious dining room where
Simms would brew a punch of unparalleled excellence, he being as
famous for the concoction of that form of gayety as was his friend,
Jamison, down the river, for the evolution of the festive cocktail.

Life flowed on pleasantly at Woodlands from October till May in those
idyllic years before death had made a graveyard of the old home and
fire had swept away the beautiful mansion.

William Gilmore Simms first opened his eyes upon the world of men in
Charleston, at a time when to be properly born in Charleston meant to
be born to the purple. William Gilmore, alas! did not inherit that
imperial color. He sprang from the good red earth, whence comes the
vigor of humanity, and dwelt in the rugged atmosphere of toil which
the Charleston eye could never penetrate. Politically, the City by the
Sea led the van in the hosts of Democracy; ethically, she remained far
in the rear with the Divine Right of Kings and the Thirty-Nine
Articles of Aristocracy.

So Charleston took little note of the boy whose father failed in trade
and fared forth to fight British and Indians under Old Hickory and to
wander in that far Southwest known as Mississippi to ascertain whether
that remote frontier might offer a livelihood to the unfortunate. The
small William Gilmore, left in the care of his grandmother, was
apprenticed to a druggist and became a familiar figure on the streets
of Charleston as he came and went on his round of errands. Small
wonder that the Queen of the Sea, having swallowed his pills and
powders in those early days, had little taste for hi