Whenever I suggested to Americans the probability that their long range of Southern coast was well suited for the culture of the olive, the suggestion was met with merriment. ‘There is no one in this country,’ they would say, ‘who looks fifteen or twenty years ahead’ (the time it takes for an olive tree to come into profitable bearing). ‘Everybody here supposes that long before so many years have expired he shall have sold his land very advantageously, or that his business will have taken him to some other part of the country, or that he shall have made his fortune and retired from business.’ The same objection does not lie against the culture of tea, for which the uplands of Georgia appeared well adapted. Atlanta I thought the most flourishing place in the South. I saw several manufactories there, and much building was going on. It has 34,000 inhabitants. ‘Sir,’ said an Atlantan gentleman to me, ‘this place is bound to become great and prosperous, because it is the most central town of the Southern States.’ I suppose he had not yet been able to divest his mind of the idea that the Southern States formed a political unit, and must have a central capital. [Sidenote: _A Virginian’s Recollections of the War._] The cattle of the South must, during the winter, be among the most miserable of their kind. I saw nothing at all resembling what we call pastures; and if such institutions (in America everything is an institution, even the lift in an hotel) are known in the South, they can be of little use at that time of year, for every blade of grass in America is then withered and dry. The cattle appeared to be kept generally in the woods, and in the maize fields, where of course they could get nothing but the leaves that were hanging on the dead stems. In the North, where the dead grass is buried in snow, and the cattle therefore must be housed and kept on artificial food and grain, they are sufficiently well off; while their brethren in the South become the victims of a more beneficent climate.