The Colonel in charge of the prisoner had been directed to report to General Gillmore, and await orders, which were promptly given. It was thought best, under all the circumstances, that there should be no other intercourse between the boats. The story of the capture, in a semi-female disguise, was fully told by the captor; and so, fresh from this final illustration of the absolute collapse of the rebellion, we landed, in the gray morning, at the Savannah wharves. To our left, across a narrow and rather turbid stream, stretched away to the sea a level marsh, flat as a Western prairie, and green with the lush vegetation of the rice swamp; on the right were rows of fine warehouses, that for four years had known neither paint nor repairs; wharves, through the broken planks of which a careless walker might readily make an unwelcome plunge into not over-cleanly water; and, back of the warehouses, high stone walls, up which, at infrequent intervals, rude staircases conduct the pedestrian to the level of the city proper. * * * * * To the Northern reader, Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Richmond, have always seemed important names; and while never unconscious that none of them were New York, or Boston, or even Baltimore, yet he has nearly always associated with them the idea of large population, fine architecture and general metropolitan appearance. Nothing better illustrates the pretentious policy of this latitude, which has been always successful in being accepted at its own valuation. Savannah, for example, which is a scattered, tolerably well-built town of twenty thousand inhabitants, about the size of Oswego or Utica, in New York, or Dayton or Columbus, in Ohio, has aspired to be the “metropolis of the South Atlantic coast” and by dint of their perpetual boasts, Georgians had actually succeeded in making us all regard it very nearly as we do Cincinnati, or Chicago, or St. Louis. A Savannah shopkeeper was indignant, beyond description, at a careless remark of mine. I had asked the population of the place, and, on being told, had answered wonderingly, “Why, that isn’t more than a thousand ahead of Lynn, the little town in Massachusetts, where they make shoes and send Henry Wilson to the United States Senate.” The shopkeeper swept off the counter the articles he had been showing me, and, with an air of disdain, said he would like to count profits on goods by the arithmetic Yankees used in estimating the population of their nasty little manufacturing holes.