If I were writing an article on Charleston in Secession time, now, here was an opportunity for description. What a strange, what a memorable period it was! involuntarily reminding one of an historic parallel in the roseate aspect presented by the early days of the first French revolution, when everybody had hailed as the dawning of a celestial morrow the putrescent glow of old corruption blending into the lurid fire of the coming _sans-culottic_ hell. In this case also an infernal _ignis fatuus_ had arisen to tempt its deluded followers toward a selfish fool's paradise, only to be obtained by wading through seas of fratricidal blood. And how they believed in this impossible future in 'the cradle of the rebellion!' Only a minority of darker conspirators apprehended--hoped for--war, thinking it necessary to precipitate the remainder of the Southern States into revolution, and the establishment of a separate nationality; the great majority of South Carolinians accepting Secession with an enthusiasm (or rather self-exaltation) and confidence astounding to witness. There would be no collision; the North could not and dared not push it to the extreme issue; she must endure the punishment due to her 'fanaticism' in inevitable bankruptcy and beggary, while the South, the seat of 'a great, free, and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down to the remotest ages' (I quote from the ordinance of Secession), had infinite possibilities before it. Jack Cade's commonwealth, Panurge's 'world, in which all men shall be debtors and borrowers,' Gonzalo's imaginary kingdom in the _Tempest_, were not a whit more extravagant than what was hourly talked of and expected from this longed-for slaveholding confederacy at this time in Charleston. But enough of digression on a subject merely incidental to this narrative. Three days after my conversation with the Colonel, when the city was jubilant with the passage of the act of Secession, I accompanied him to the plantation spoken of. It involved a little steamboat journey, sundry rides in chaise or buggy, and the crossing of more than one of the many creeks or rivers intersecting the low, sandy, swampy coast. I purposely abstain from particularizing the locality. It was toward the close of a mild, humid day when we reached the Colonel's residence.