“While we were conversing with the lessee, we observed a negro woman, with two children, leaning against the railing of the Verandah. Her countenance wore so sad a look that we asked for the cause. The story was mournful enough. She had been sick. Another woman had come into her house to attend to her work. Her husband, Tony, had taken a fancy to the other woman. After awhile, he had gone away and ‘married her.’ She had insisted upon his remaining with her. He had done so, for some time, and then gone off again to live with the other wife. Where was her husband? ‘He was in the meeting-house, yonder, praying.’ Of course, they had been slaves, had but recently left the ‘old plantation,’ where such things were little more than matters of course. The vices of the negro are the vices of the slave. When ‘Tony’ will know what it is to be a freeman, he will know, also, that it will not do to have two wives, and to go praying, while one of his wives, with her and his children, are standing by the side of the meeting-house, weeping over his inconstancy.” CHAPTER XII. Business, Speculation and Progress Among the Sea Island Negroes. Whatever may be the end of the wars for the “great city,” which everybody assures us is to be built hereabouts—at Hilton Head, _or_ at Bay Point, _or_ up the river, at Beaufort—it is certain that, thus far, Hilton Head has the start in business. Wading through the sand here, one finds, at the distance of a square or two from the landing, a row of ambitious-fronted one and two-story frame houses, blooming out in the most extravagant display of fancy-lettered signs. The sutlers and keepers of trade stores, who do here abound, style their street Merchants’ Row. The luckless staff officers, who have made their purchases there, preferred to call it “Robbers’ Row,” and there was the inherent fitness in the title which makes names stick.