That these glowing anticipations of Port Royal greatness will be realized, at least in part, is unquestionable. The harbor is one of the very finest on the coast—incomparably superior to either Charleston or Savannah. The Sea Island soil produces the best cotton in the world, and the negroes already have it in a state of more thorough cultivation than was ever before known. The increased wants of the freedmen will stimulate trade, and small farmers will not be able, as the planters were in old times, to go to Savannah or Charleston and buy supplies at wholesale. Whatever the fortune of South Carolina, the Sea Islands must henceforth be flourishing. Whether negroes will not, by and by, prefer to trade with persons of their own color, remains to be seen. Real estate ventures must be further complicated, also, with the probabilities that the whole sea-coast of South Carolina (if not the entire State), will speedily become one vast negro colony. Already, the only inhabitants on the Sea Islands are negroes, and the same race is in a majority for many miles inland. Compulsory colonization has always been a failure; but is it not probable that there will be a natural tendency of negroes to places where flourishing negro communities are already established, and the local government is mainly in their own hands? Some of our party, who remained at Beaufort after the meeting, gave amusing accounts of a negro wedding. It seems that the good superintendent’s remark—if he had only known we were coming he would have had two or three weddings for us—was no idle boast. Scarcely a Sunday passes without a marriage, and the young volunteers, who imagine their monthly pay a pretty good “start” for a family, are especially given to matrimonial ventures. Many of the Sea Islanders, while in slavery, came well up to the description of Brigham Young, whom Artemus Ward pronounced the “most married man” he ever saw. But polygamy is a practice not permitted by the beneficent Government to the poor negroes now—only white people, in distant localities, can be indulged in so doubtful a luxury—and herewith arises one of General Saxton’s chief embarrassments. It would often happen that, in the course of being transferred from one plantation to another, a negro would have successively three or four, or even half a dozen wives. Now that he is restricted to one, which should it be? Moralists and theorists would answer, “the first;” General Saxton, with the instinct of a sound political economist, says “the one that has the most children.” As for the rest, they must hunt up other husbands.