With such a past, Charleston looks hopefully into the future, confidently expecting as signal triumphs in the arts of peace as her sons once achieved against the fleets of France, Spain and England. [Illustration: SEAL OF CHARLESTON.] FOOTNOTES: [7] The crude rules for passenger transportation in “the thirties” read strangely to the traveller who almost annihilates time and space in the modern “vestibule train,” at the rate of sixty miles or more an hour. An early resolution of the South Carolina Railroad Board of Directors declares that there shall be “in future not over twenty-five passengers to any car; speed shall not exceed one car and passengers at fifteen miles per hour; two cars and passengers at twelve miles per hour; three cars and passengers at ten miles per hour.” [Illustration] SAVANNAH NEVER LAST AND OFTEN FIRST BY PLEASANT ALEXANDER STOVALL The city of Savannah is now a centre of railroad and steamship lines. It has the heaviest commerce of all the Atlantic ports south of Baltimore. It is the largest naval stores market in the world, and its cotton and lumber receipts are very considerable. But in spite of its commercial primacy Savannah preserves a distinct flavor of the olden time. On the shores of the Savannah River, where the British ships were burned in the Revolution, a railroad system is cutting slips and building piers, spending a million dollars in terminal facilities. The high bluff where the early colonists planted their crane in 1732 to move goods from the ships to the river bank is now walled-in stone, and the strand is gridironed with steel rails. The powder magazine near “the Old Fort,” afterwards seized by the patriots of the Revolution, is the site of flourishing foundries. The filature where early colonists were taught to spin silk has been dismantled, and long rows of brick tenements front upon the sandy streets. The tall pines under which Oglethorpe pitched his tents survived the shock of war, and succumbed only to the sweeping storms in 1800. To-day this site is paved with brick and Belgian block, and is the centre of the Bay, where cotton and wholesale men do congregate. “The publick oven” on Congress Street stood opposite Tondee’s tavern, where the first liberty pole was elevated by the patriots, and where a tablet has been placed in the wall of a thriving grocery store to mark the birth of newer freedom. “Fort Halifax,” the breastworks of the “Liberty Boys,” is now covered by the wharves and warehouses of the Ocean Steamship Company, the busiest spot in all Georgia. Spring Hill redoubt, where Pulaski died, is lined by the brick walls of the Georgia Central Railway. The executive mansion of Sir James Wright, the last royal Governor, stood where the United States has just finished its marble post office, perhaps the handsomest public building in the country, with the exception of the Congressional Library. [Illustration: THE POST OFFICE.]