William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[145] his eirie in the clouds the heart of South Carolina. What a proud and indolent people; what a sunny, picturesque place! Observe the Ashley and the Cooper, rivers which embrace the city, as the Hudson and East rivers hug New York-how lazily they roll into the bay, and curl about the shores and islets, lapping and ebbing with the tides, around Fort Ripley and Fort Sumter, and out, by the Beach Channel, into the Atlantic Ocean! Peep into these nooks of myrtle and palmettoes at our feet. What verdure on the ground-what colour in the trees You may have seen sweet nooks before; but where on earth a nest more perfect in its kind than one of these villas on the bay, looking over Castle Pinckney and King Street Battery, with balconies screened by roses and palmettoes, and with oranges hanging to the water's edge? And then, what women pace these walks, peep from these lattices, adorn these balustrades! Surely the mothers of these women must have been the ladies painted by Lely and Vandyke!

Yet what a fiery energy in the men and women! It is a saying in Charleston “that no Negro or I[Mulatto dares to look straight into a ”