I left Charleston at midday. It was a cold day, but there was no ice in the town. A few miles out of the town, on the Augusta railway, it was freezing sharply, the railway-side ditches were coated with ice, and the ground was white with hoarfrost wherever the sun had not touched it. I supposed that the warmer air from the bay had kept the frost out of the town. All through that day in travelling as far as Augusta, and for the next two days, I found the frost in the country between Augusta and Atlanta very severe. We should have considered them unusually cold days in England; and yet there was not a cloud to intercept a ray of the Southern sun. To my sensations it was colder than I found it on any other occasion during my tour in the United States. I mention this because it is satisfactory to collect indications of large districts of the South being adapted to white labour. No doubt the summer throughout this region is very warm, but here it was cold enough to brace up relaxed constitutions. [Sidenote: _The Olive unfitted for America._] I here saw an effect of frost, which, I suppose from differences in radiation and evaporation, is never seen in England. Everywhere along the railway embankments and cuttings, the ice appeared to have shot out in rays or spikes, three or four inches in length, and then to have bent over. When the rays were shorter they remained straight. I asked a gentleman how the people of the country explained the phenomenon. ‘Our explanation of it is,’ he replied, ‘that in these parts the land spues up the ice.’ A Southern man does not set the same value on time a Northern one does. The day, he thinks, will be long enough for all he has to do. I often saw trains stopped, not at a station, for the purpose of taking up or putting down a single passenger. I even saw this done that a parcel or letter might be taken from a person standing by the railway side. On one occasion an acquaintance with whom I was travelling that day, and myself, both happened to have had no dinner. We mentioned this to the conductor, and asked him if he could manage in any way to let us have some supper. ‘Oh, yes,’ he readily replied, ‘I will at eleven o’clock stop the train at a house in the forest, where I sometimes have had supper myself. I will give you twenty minutes.’ I suppose the other passengers, none of whom left their seats, imagined that we had stopped to repair some small damage, or to take in wood or water, for on returning to the car we heard no observations made on the delay.