A foreigner, who visited Charleston in May, 1861, spoke of these streets as “looking like Paris in the revolution—crowds of armed men singing and promenading the streets; the battle blood running through their veins; that hot oxygen, which is called ‘the flush of victory,’ on the cheek; restaurants full; reveling in bar rooms, club rooms crowded, orgies and carousings in taverns or private houses, in tap rooms, down narrow alleys, in the broad highways.” This is the anniversary of that mad era; but the streets look widely different. There are crowds of armed men in the streets, but they move under the strictest discipline and their color is black. No battle blood mantles the faces of the haggard and listless Charlestonians one meets—it is rather blood born of low diet and water gruel. For the flush of victory we have utter despondency. The restaurants are closed and the shutters are up; the occupants of the club rooms are dead, or in prison, or in exile; there is still carousing in taverns, but it is only by the flushed and spendthrift Yankee officers who are willing to pay seventy-five cents for a cobbler. Of the leaders of those days, scarcely one remains to receive the curses which, even in the midst of their hatred of the Yankees, the people pour out upon the men who converted their prosperity into desolation. Then they were singing— “With mortar, paixhan and petard, We send Old Abe our Beauregard.” But Beauregard is a prisoner, given leave, by “Old Abe’s” parole, to humbly enter his home at New Orleans, from which the loving wife, whom he deserted for secession, has gone out forever. Huger is dead. Barnwell Rhett is in exile, and the very journal by which he fed and nurtured the germs of the Rebellion, has passed absolutely out of existence—no new editor daring to revive so ill-omened a thing as the Charleston _Mercury_.[12] Governor Pickens, who announced in one of his early proclamations that he was born insensible to fear, has lived to learn his mistake, and has vanished into the dim unknown of “the interior.” Governor Aiken, who, (like that political eunuch, Alexander H. Stephens,) weakly yielded his convictions and eased his conscience by blockade running, instead of fighting, has, for some unknown reason, been arrested and sent to Washington. Governor Manning, Porcher Miles, Senator Chesnut, Barnwell, have all vanished into thin air before the Ithuriel touch—nay, rather before the mere approach of negro bayonets. The merchants, too, whom Southern independence was to make the cotton factors of the world, have disappeared. Their direct line of steamers to Liverpool failed to get beyond the blockading fleet, and long before the politicians had given it up, these men were hopelessly ruined. Trenholm, indeed, pushed a precarious but lucrative trade in blockade running, and succeeded better in managing his own funds than he did those of the