These Steamers Are Among The Very Best
That Float - Quiet, Commodious, Clean, Fresh As If Just Built, And
Furnished With Civil And Ready-Handed Waiters.
We passed along the narrow
and winding channels which divide the broad islands of South Carolina from
the main-land - islands famed for the rice culture, and particularly for
the excellent cotton with long fibres, named the sea-island cotton.
Our
fellow-passengers were mostly planters of these islands, and their
families, persons of remarkably courteous, frank, and agreeable manners.
The shores on either side had little of the picturesque to show us.
Extensive marshes waving with coarse water-grass, sometimes a cane-brake,
sometimes a pine grove or a clump of cabbage-leaved palmettoes; here and
there a pleasant bank bordered with live-oaks streaming with moss, and at
wide intervals the distant habitation of a planter - these were the
elements of the scenery. The next morning early we were passing up the
Savannah river, and the city was in sight, standing among its trees on a
high bank of the stream.
Savannah is beautifully laid out; its broad streets are thickly planted
with the Pride of India, and its frequent open squares shaded with trees
of various kinds. Oglethorpe seems to have understood how a city should be
built in a warm climate, and the people of the place are fond of reminding
the stranger that the original plan of the founder has never been departed
from. The town, so charmingly embowered, reminded me of New Haven, though
the variety of trees is greater. In my walks about the place I passed a
large stuccoed building of a dull-yellow color, with broad arched windows,
and a stately portico, on each side of which stood a stiff looking
palmetto, as if keeping guard. The grim aspect of the building led me to
ask what it was, and I was answered that it was "the old United States
Bank," It was the building in which the Savannah branch of that bank
transacted business, and is now shut up until the time shall come when
that great institution shall be revived. Meantime I was pained to see that
there exists so little reverence for its memory, and so little gratitude
for its benefits, that the boys have taken to smashing the windows, so
that those who have the care of the building have been obliged to cover
them with plank. In another part of the city I was shown an African
church, a neat, spacious wooden building, railed in, and kept in excellent
order, with a piazza extending along its entire front. It is one of the
four places of worship for the blacks of the town, and was built by negro
workmen with materials purchased by the contributions of the whites.
South of the town extends an uninclosed space, on one side of which is a
pleasant grove of pines, in the shade of which the members of a quoit-club
practice their athletic sport.
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