Washington Allston spent several years in Charleston, where were many of his relatives, whose descendants still possess several of his paintings. “Saint Mémin, limner,” is one of the names to be found in the Charleston City Directory for 1809; but few of the original crayon drawings and copper plates of that industrious French gentleman have escaped the tooth of time. Louis R. Mignot, the son of a French confectioner, was the only landscape painter from Charleston whose ability is recognized in Europe. S. G. W. Benjamin considers him one of the most remarkable artists of our country and says that he was equally happy in rendering the various aspects of nature, “whether it was the superb splendor of the tropical scenery of the Rio Bamba in South America, the sublime maddening rush of iris-circled water at Niagara, or the fairy-like grace, the exquisite and ethereal loveliness of new-fallen snow.” The only living Charlestonian known to the art world is the artist-author Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum, who was born in August, 1849, was educated at the Art Students’ League in New York and studied under Donnat in Paris. He is still in the heyday of his powers, and has no superior in the United States as a delineator of military and naval subjects. The economic and commercial history of the city, while not so eventful or of so absorbing interest as its military and civil annals, cannot be entirely overlooked. One crop which is not now cultivated in the State, but which once enriched the people of the planter city, was first cultivated by a woman, Eliza Lucas, the accomplished daughter of Colonel Lucas, Governor of Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands, and afterward the mother of General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and General Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina. With seed sent her by her father, Miss Lucas, in 1741-42, planted the first indigo in South Carolina. In 1748, Parliament passed an act allowing a bounty of sixpence per pound, and just before the Revolution the export from Charleston had risen to 1,107,660 pounds. The cultivation of rice was one of the earliest planting experiments in the State, and though Ramsay, the historian, attributes its introduction to Governor Thomas Smith and a small bag of seed procured from Madagascar in 1694, it is certain that rice had been successfully grown in South Carolina as early as 1691. In 1770, the surplus over consumption exported from Charleston had risen to 120,000 barrels, valued at $1,530,000. As early as 1770, “patches” of cotton were grown in South Carolina, and year by year thereafter for two decades indigo cultivation declined, and was finally entirely abandoned.