After leaving Augusta, we went to Savannah once more, and on the 29th of January went on board the little steamer Gen. Clinch, which was afterward turned into a gunboat during the civil war, to begin our voyage by the inland route to St. Augustine, Florida. This inland route has some peculiar and picturesque features. The steamer passes down the Savannah River, with its banks lined with the green and gold orange trees, until, near the mouth, it turns into its proper route, leading through a succession of small sounds, connected by narrow, serpentine rivers, where you seem to be sailing over the meadows, usually in sight of the ocean, and quite often aground for some hours at a time. The steamer was very small and very crowded, our progress very leisurely and interrupted by several long stoppages, so that our voyage was protracted for five days. It is seldom that a more motley or singular and amusing group of passengers is collected in a small cabin. {159} Besides the three Catholic priests, who were to the others the greatest curiosities on board, we had an army lieutenant, since then the commander of a _corps d'armée_ in the great civil war, an old wizard who was consulting his familiar spirits incessantly for the amusement or information of the passengers; a plantation doctor, a wild young Arkansas lawyer of the fire-eating type, a professor of mathematics, a crotchety, good-humored New York farmer, with very peculiar religious opinions, a young man who professed himself a universal sceptic, two or three gentlemen of education and polished manners, who were not at all singular, but appeared quite so in such an odd assemblage; and some others in no way remarkable. The cramped accommodations, the long voyage, and the usual _bonhommie_ which prevails on such occasions were well fitted to draw out all the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the company. The spiritualist, who was an uneducated and uncouth specimen of humanity, with a great deal of native shrewdness, and a good-humored, loquacious disposition, was the center of attraction. The professor and the philosophical farmer engaged with him in a long and earnest discussion of spiritualism, which ended in his exhibiting his powers as a consulter of the spirits. Most of the passengers made trial of his skill in this respect, although his performance was the most patent of silly impostures, only amusing from its absurdity. The professor tried him sorely by asking him a question which seemed to have caused himself many an hour of anxious and fruitless thought, and which he appeared to despair of solving metaphysically: "Can God annihilate space?" The old gentleman's spirit did not appear to have investigated this question to his own complete satisfaction, for he gave him no positive answer. He was silent for a moment, with a puzzled look, evidently fearing a trap, and at last answered, "I don't know, but I guess He could if He tried; He made it, and I guess He