On the other hand, the reports from the North-west, or mountain region of the State, indicate little prospect of suffering. “I tell you,” said a South Carolinian, from Greenville, “the South could have continued the war for ten years, if it had had your Northern gift of perseverance. We were neither exhausted of men nor of provisions; it was only that the flame of enthusiasm had burnt out. I have myself traveled, within the past month, through sections of South Carolina, from Greenville to Columbia, and thence north-east and north-west, so as to know accurately the condition of the crops in one-half the State. There is no trouble about starvation. The people are not suffering, except in such isolated cases as you will always find, and there is a larger breadth of grains planted than ever before. With reasonable care there ought to be no starvation this winter.” * * * * * There was a little party in the evening, in the fine old mansion of a noted Charleston banker, but there were few South Carolinians there, excepting the house servants who had remained to wait on the new occupants. Admiral Dahlgren, Major-General Saxton, two or three Brigadiers and Brevet Brigadiers, and their wives, made up the bulk of the company; and the talk was of the army and navy and the policy of the Government. A gentleman was introduced as the editor of the Charleston _Courier_, and I was not a little surprised to find that redoubtable Rebel personage greeting me with the warmth of an old acquaintance. He turned out to be a former _attaché_ of a leading New York paper, who had often reported to me in Washington, when I had been in temporary charge of its bureau there. Persons writing from here in the spring of 1861, said there was no feature of the feeling among the leaders more marked than their scarcely disguised hostility to the freedom of the press. I had been reading over some of those letters, of four years ago, in the morning; and it sounded curiously, like a continuation of the old strain, to hear the editor’s lamentations over the impossibility of making a newspaper where you could express no opinions, and couldn’t always even print the news. “Here, yesterday, for example, was a reconstruction meeting. The call for it was sent to me. I published that, and then sent phonographers to make a full report of the proceedings. There was a big row; the whites ordered out the negroes; then the latter got re-enforced, and came back to maintain their ground, whereupon the whites left. The speeches on both sides were racy; there was a good deal of excitement. I had a splendid report of the whole thing, and it was capital news. I had it all in type, when an order came to make no allusion whatever to the meeting. This morning everybody thinks the _Courier_ is behind the times, because it didn’t know anything about the reconstruction meeting!”