There is little of the old fort standing; it is a ruin now--a grim picturesque rugged ruin, almost levelled to a mound of rock and sand; desolation, with its empty socketless eyes, stares from the narrow loopholes, where twenty years ago there flashed the fiery orbs of war. We descended, or rather scrambled, down a flight of broken steps--it seemed we were going into the bowels of the earth--peeped into what looked like dark, narrow graves, where the men used to lie, smothered and half stifled, while they worked their guns, and living through this death in life for four long years, they came out of their darkness to the light of the sun to find their martyrdom had been in vain--their cause was lost. But the gates are closed upon all these things, and God keeps the key. CHAPTER VI. The great Salt Marsh.--A break down.--We reach Savannah.--Fancy sketches.--The forest city.--A Gossip with the Natives.--Cross questions and crooked answers. On the sweetest of spring mornings, when the sunshine seems to reach down into our hearts, and the soft breeze stirs our pulse and sets our thoughts playing a jubilant melody, while our hearts sing a soft sweet song that the ears hear not, and that our own spirits can but dimly comprehend--we turn our back on the quaint old city of Charleston, and resume our journey South. Squatting about the platform of the railway station we find groups and whole families of negroes, or, as they are now more respectfully called, “coloured folk,”--from the queer little black ball of a baby, to the withered old grandmother with a face notched and scarred, as though time had kept his calendar and scored the passing years in wrinkles, till they all run one into the other, and the face was made up of nothing else. They are dressed, as is the custom of their kind, in all the colours of the rainbow, and are heavily laden with baskets of fish, fruit, vegetables, and bundles of their personal belongings, with their “piccaninnies” sprawling at their feet and crawling in and out like little black eels. We are struck with an idea, almost a dread, that they are going to ride in our car--not that we object to the colour of “God’s image carved in ebony,” but their neighbourhood is not odorous. “We has second class on dis line,” said the porter, in answer to our inquiries, “and dey be gwine dere; dey’s no company for white folk--not clean, nor nice in dey’s manners. I’s black myself, but I knows dem folk’s no company for ladies and gen’l’men.”