When we left Havana our new friends went with us to Charleston, and invited us to visit them at their home in Columbia, S. C. This we were glad to do. The house at which the Hamptons received us belonged to an elder brother, Wade Hampton, whose family were at this time traveling in Europe. Wade Hampton called upon Dr. Howe, and soon introduced a topic which we would gladly have avoided, namely, the strained relations between the North and the South. "We mean to fight for it," said Wade Hampton. But Dr. Howe afterwards said to me: "They cannot be in earnest about meaning to fight. It would be too insane, too fatal to their own interests." So indeed it proved, but they then knew us as little as we knew them. They thought that we could not fight, and we thought that they would not. Both parties were soon made wiser by sad experience. My account of this trip, after publication in the "Atlantic Monthly," was issued in book form by Ticknor and Fields. Years after this time, a friend of mine landed in Cuba with a copy of the book in her hand luggage. It was at once taken from her by the custom-house officers, and she never saw it again. This little work was favorably spoken of and well received, but it did not please everybody. In one of its chapters, speaking of the natural indolence of the negroes in tropical countries, I had ventured to express the opinion that compulsory employment is better than none. Good Mr. Garrison seized upon this sentence, and impaled it in a column of "The Liberator" headed, "The Refuge of Oppression." I certainly did not intend it as an argument in favor of negro slavery. As an abstract proposition, and without reference to color, I still think it true. The publication of my Cuban notes brought me an invitation to chronicle the events of the season at Newport for the "New York Tribune." This was the beginning of a correspondence with that paper which lasted well into the time of the civil war. My letters dealt somewhat with social doings in Newport and in Boston, but more with the great events of the time. To me the experience was valuable in that I found myself brought nearer in sympathy to the general public, and helped to a better understanding of its needs and demands.