Those who visit these islands to-day, must not expect to realize, in the altered condition of affairs, their ideal of plantation life, however that ideal may have been formed. The change which has been wrought in little more than a year, is truly wonderful. The traces of slavery may indeed be found in an exhausted soil and an exhausted race, but all outward signs of the institution have been removed. 'The whip is lost, the handcuff broken,' the whipping post destroyed, and the cotton gins broken down. At the 'great house' you find, instead of the master and overseer, the superintendent and school teacher. In the field, the cotton tasks are comparatively small, but the garden patch in the rear of the cabin is large, well fenced in and well cultivated. If you see few indications of positive happiness, you find no appearances of overburdened misery. There is about the whole place something of the air of a New England farmstead, where labor, being honored, crowns even the humblest with dignity and peace. You take unspeakable comfort in the fact, that, open what door you may into the life of these people, there is no _skeleton_ of oppression to startle and haunt you. Go with me, then, on this calm, bright day of early March, to visit one of the plantations on Port Royal Island, a few miles out of Beaufort. The quartermaster kindly furnishes us with a carriage, somewhat shabby and rickety to be sure, but one of the best that 'Secesh' has left for our use. Our steeds, too, are only slow-moving Government mules, but there is one aristocratic feature of our establishment to remind us of the life that was, viz.: a negro coachman 'educated to drive,' under whose skilful guidance many a happy family party have been conveyed from plantation to plantation on social visits like ours to-day. Uncle Ned speaks kindly of his 'ole massa,' and says he 'would hab stayed wid 'um, ef massa hadn't run away from heself.' 'But why didn't you _go_ with him, uncle?' 'Oh, sah, I could nebber go to de Secesh.' Doubtless many more of the house slaves and body servants of the planters would have followed their masters, had they not been deterred by fear of the rebel soldiers and hard work in the trenches.