with precipitating the fall of Richmond in the following April. [Illustration: _On the Ashley, near Charleston, S. C._] CHARLESTON AND FORT SUMTER. The railway from Wilmington to the South at first goes westward through a region largely composed of swamps, and then entering South Carolina turns southward past Florence to Charleston. The country is a variation of pine barrens and morass, sparsely inhabited, but raising much cotton, with many bales brought to the stations for shipment. There is a much larger population of blacks than of whites. Charleston, the metropolis of South Carolina, is an active seaport with sixty-five thousand inhabitants, having a good export trade in cotton, timber, naval stores, rice, fruits and phosphate rock, of which there are extensive deposits on Ashley River nearby. It is a low-lying city, built upon a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, just inland from the ocean, and having a good harbor. Its many wooden houses are varied by more pretentious ones of brick and stone, but there is an air of decadence produced by the traces still remaining of the earthquake of 1886, which destroyed the greater part of the buildings and killed many people. The dwelling architecture of Charleston presents the tropical features of open verandas, spacious porticos and broad windows looking out upon gardens in which the palmetto tree grows, typical of South Carolina, the "Palmetto State." At the point of the peninsula between the rivers is the Battery, a park and popular promenade overlooking the harbor, with Fort Sumter down on its little shoal-like island, seen as a small dark streak upon the distant horizon. The first settlements in this part of South Carolina were made on the west bank of Ashley River, but the town, which had been named in honor of King Charles II., in 1680 was transferred to its present site. Charleston was prominent in the Revolution, its troops under Colonel Moultrie repelling a British attack upon Sullivan's Island in 1776; but the city was captured by Sir Henry Clinton in 1780 after an obstinate defense. Before the Civil War it was the chief cotton-shipping port of America, though it is now surpassed by the Gulf ports and by Savannah. The great memory in the city of that time of its greatest prosperity is of the apostle of "State Rights," the South Carolina statesman, John C. Calhoun, who died in 1850. His statue stands in Citadel Square, and his grave is in St. Philip's churchyard.