and, failing to discover it, call Mrs Stowe an impostor, pull their nightcaps over their eyes, and dream of anything but of getting out, as I did at two o'clock on a pitch-dark morning, at a solitary log-hut, in the midst of that dreary region, where the cars stopped for about five seconds. In these swamps the above-named rivers rise, and after a winding course approach the sea, and near it fertilise a vast extent of alluvial country, where the rice-fields extend to the distant woods, and on the river-banks neat comfortable mansions of opulent planters are situated, with lawns reaching down to the water, surrounded by well-tended gardens, and sheltered by noble trees; while, a little way back, a street of negro houses, like a country village, contains their living store of the material wealth of the proprietor. Broadgrinning visages greet you merrily as you pass through it; and if the occasion of your arrival is that also of the master, after his absence during the summer months, great is the commotion which is created; all the field-hands come trooping in to welcome him; the old and decrepid hobble out of their cabins; and the juvenile portion of the population, under charge of a stalwart matron, are drawn up, a somewhat mutinouslooking assemblage of curly heads; and a shaking of hands commences, beginning with the master, and going through all his own family, and then on to the guest, so that by the time the latter has grasped 300 hands, whose owners are of both sexes, of every age, and are reeking at the moment with the effects of every description of manual labour, he is abundantly satisfied with the evidences of their good-will. That this scene necessarily takes place every autumn is one of the greatest drawbacks to the possession of property in this part of the country. But so it is. Every spring the owners of all these plantations are compelled, by the unhealthiness of the climate during the summer months, to vacate their houses, leaving their rice-fields to the care of a sickly fever-eaten European overseer, to betake themselves to the gaieties of the Virginia springs, or Newport, or, crossing the Atlantic, to swell the crowd of Conti nental tourists, until the first frost proclaims the setting-in of the cool weather, and the extinction of those noxious influences which the malaria of the lowlands of South Carolina exercise upon all but the negro. Even Mr Olmsted, the stanch advocate of white labour in the Southern States, can scarcely deny the necessity here of the African race as cultivators of the soil. If you see a faint tinge of colour in the usually blanched cheek of a European child, and compliment the mother upon its comparatively healthy appearance, she will probably answer, "Yes, sir, he missed fever this season ;" and even then the family has been living either in pine-woods or on the sea-beach, as being more healthy than the plantation, and the overseer has had a long ride to and from his day's work. But when that deadly season is over, families come flocking back, and open the doors of the hospitable houses which have been closed for six months past, and the traveller who has the good fortune to enter them may thank his lucky stars, and find that his lines have fallen in pleasant places. If life on a slave plantation is new to him, and he arrives with the notion popular in England upon the subject, he will find the occupation interesting of becoming practically acquainted with the working of what Americans call" our peculiar institution." If his host be a good master, he will have an opportunity of seeing it in operation under its most favourable aspect; and whatever may have been his preconceived notions upon the matter, he will find himself driven to the conclusion, that however indefensible, in a moral point of view, he may conceive slavery to be, it may be made to conduce to a degree of happiness and contentment in the slave, as much beyond the ordinary experience of the peasantry of free countries, as is that opposite extreme of misery and distress which the same system is no less liable to involve. It is its peculiarity, that in its operation it embraces the most widely different results. It is seldom, however, that the traveller has an opportunity of witnessing for himself the more flagrant abuses of slavery; the probability being that his friend is a gentleman and a humane master, or else he would not have made his acquaintance, and become his guest. I have often regretted that no tyrant, or even commonly cruel master, ever asked me to stay with him; but it is not easy to be honoured by an invitation from such a quarter, because, in all likelihood, such a man and the friends whose guest you are, are not intimate, or, perhaps, even not on speaking terms. To stroll, then, through the negro houses, to visit one which is set apart as an hospital, and others which contain curious fossil specimens of negro humanity, whose working days have been past for thirty years, and who have all that time been pensioned and cared for by their master and his wife, upon whose heads they have just strength and sense enough left to mumble blessings as he enters; to listen to others, not yet so far advanced in dotage, recall reminiscences of three or four generations back of the family to which they have belonged for nearly a century; to pass on to the other extreme, and inspect the nursery, where the juvenile community are grinning and rioting and driving their elderly guardian to despair; to extend our walk into ricefields, and watch all the papas and mammas of these little urchins at work, the former taking it uncommonly easily, and the latter perpetually giggling over jokes known to themselves, and very ready to shake hands upon all occasions, and afterwards to titter and blush unseen ;to go through an experience of this sort on divers plantations, will, to say the least of it, conduce to a certain modification of the idea which possesses most of my countrymen, that misery is the rule, and happiness the exception, with the negro in the Southern States of America. Lat terly, no doubt, in consequence of a series of revivals, the result of perpetual camp-meetings, the negroes have assumed a certain air of solemn gravity and sobriety, a good deal at variance with the natural vivacity of their dispositions-a characteristic, however, which they never manage effectually to smother. On some plantations in South Carolina they had, at the period of my visit, given up dancing, held constant prayer meetings, and never sang anything but their own sacred compositions. These chants break with their pleasant melody the calm stillness of evening, as we glide down the broad bosom of the Wacamaw, and our crew with measured stroke keep time to the music of their own choruses. The words, however, are more original than the music. Here are specimens taken down as they were sung: "Oh I takes my text in Matthew, And some in Revelation; Oh I know you by your garmentThere's a meeting here to-night." This is the entire effusion, and is constantly repeated, the last line being the chorus; some, however, are more elaborate: "In that morning, true believers, In that morning Generally, indeed, the airs were appropriate to the spirit of the composition; some of them were sung with great vehemence and unction, and from the excitement of tone and manner, the susceptibility of the negro to appeals of this nature to his devotional instincts was evident. The sacred names were generally screamed rather than sung, with an almost ecstatic fervour. The two following were clearly great favourites : "The heavenly bell is ringing loud, "Broders, don't you hear the horn? horn." It does not require the last line of the latter composition to prove its originality; indeed, all of them differ very much from the Nigger Melodies, popularly so called, both in the character of the music and words. Nor does any attempt at rhyme enter into their construction. The most important consideration, however, connected with the spread of this devotional spirit by which the negro is apparently so much influenced, is how far it practically affects his daily walk and conversation; nor have my inquiries on this point, I regret to say, been satisfactory. The exhortation which I once heard proceed from the lips of a negro preacher, when holding forth with great earnestness to his sable congregation in another part of the country, would be as much to the purpose here as it was there : Oh my deary bredren," he ejaculated, "don't waste your precious lives in drink, or dash dem away in adultery!" If, beguiled by these dulcet strains, we push our aquatic expedition farther than usual, we reach at length the little port of Georgetown, to which the tradition alone remains of its former importance, when the first colonists from England made it their seat of government. Now, it lives upon the necessities of the neighbouring planters, and is a dull unhealthy place, containing about two thousand inhabitants. It is, however, conveniently situated on the Winiyaw for the export of the productions of the surrounding country, about eighteen miles from the sea. Steamers ply to Charleston, which they reach in ten or twelve hours. But it is not necessary to pass through Georgetown to reach the sea; there is a short cut from most of the plantations through a belt of pine forest to the shore, which differs materially from what is called the beach, inasmuch as the latter consists of a bank of sand separated from the pine-fringed shore by a narrow lagoon, which must be crossed in order to reach the summer-houses of the planters, who find that this strip of water importantly affects the salubrity of the climate, and whose wooden erections are consequently placed on the sand, with the seaspray almost beating into the front windows, and the waters of the lagoon washing their back stairs the whole arrangement presenting a very desert-island aspect indeed; and at this season, except for curiosity, there is no object in visiting it. A more profitable way of spending the declining hours of day is to explore the neighbourhood, driving or riding among the surrounding plantations, or to navigate, under pleasant guidance, the numerous channels which connect the large streams, and which afford a convenient mode of intercommunication; or, for the sake of variety, to sit with a gun upon the ridge of a rice-field; and as dense flocks of wild-ducks, of numerous varieties, come winding past in long single-file, or, closing their ranks, settle in dense masses, with noisy quack and flutter, all round you, to provide for the larder until it becomes so dark that, though you can hear them paddling and scuffling about in a most tantalising proximity, you are compelled to relinquish your occupation with regret. Meantime we grieve to say that we must allow no attractions of this or any other sort to induce us to prolong our stay the time has come when we must steel our breasts against all hospitable entreaties, and once more prepare ourselves to undergo afresh the usual experience of American travel-to pass some nights to come in the state-rooms of river steamboats, and on the uncomfortable seats of crowded cars; to eat a series of dinners at gaunt hotels, at the risk of dying of indigestion; to swallow incredible quantities of boiling-hot oyster-soup at miserable stations; to be jostled in omnibuses, through large towns, from one terminus to another, and then to find that the connection has been broken, and that we are condemned to pass the six small hours of the cold morning on a platform, waiting to start; to imbibe innumerable drinks, at divers bars, of infinite variety of composition, with a miscellaneous succession of travelling companions, whom we are continually fraternising and parting with, as we each follow our respective routes; to run off the rails at one place; to be nearly burnt in a steamer loaded with cotton in another; to become reconciled at last to all our miseries, and quite sorry that the journey is over, because we have performed the last half of it with some really charming family, and have laughed in company at what we groaned at alone. All these are, I say, incidents of American travel, more or less of which all who venture upon that species of excitement may be prepared to expect. stocked homesteads, but merely to introduce to the reader the home of Evangeline's youth, ere we follow her footsteps on her distant wanderings; for it so happened that, stormstayed on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, and unable to cross it, I was once compelled to traverse its eastern margin, and thus visited the scene which Longfellow has invested with a melancholy interest, not then imagining that I was journeying in the track of that band of exiles who, "Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune, Sought for their kith and kin among the few-acred farmers On the Acadian coast and the prairies of fair Opelousas." Few probably besides ourselves have ever started from that secluded little valley to visit those distant prairies; fortunately I did not wander on so sad a quest. "Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand Pré.” It is replaced by a thriving English settlement under another name, and not many miles off. The prosperous town of Windsor is rising into importance, and the terminus of a railway; while through the village that stands on the site of Grand Pré, a coach-road leads to Annapolis, and affords one of the prettiest drives in "Acadie, home of the happy," for such it still is, though they are chiefly British and not French happy. Still a rem'nant exists of its French population; and here and there an old house, with frames of oak and of chestnut, such as the peasants of Normandy built in the reigns of the Henries, bears witness to the nationality of its founder. They are, however, generally replaced by the substantial mansions of the prosperous Nova Scotian farmer, whose fields extend for many a rood in every direction, and evidence an amount of enterprise and industry which, I fear me, the countrymen of Evangeline could never hope to rival. But, happy though the scenes of her childhood were, the maiden in search of her lover was destined to traverse with a heavy heart others still more attractive. "On the banks of the Têche are the towns of St Maur and St Martin; Beautiful is the land, with its prairies and forests of fruit-trees; Under the feet a garden of flowers, and the bluest of heavens Bending above, and resting its dome on Thither let us follow her, and judge of it for ourselves: to reach it we must cross the delta of the Mississippi, and thread the innumerable channels, called Bayous, by which that father of waters, percolating through its own vast alluvial deposits, finds its outlets to the sea. Some idea of the extent of this delta may be formed from the fact, that a railway extends from New Orleans for about seventy miles into the heart of it, passing all the way through a flat and marshy country, where the tangled roots of lofty trees twist themselves into the mud, and a thick underwood renders any attempt to penetrate the gloomy recesses of the forest impossible. Sometimes it crosses a moving prairie, impassable for passengers except by the railway, which is supported on piles. Occasionally a deer, startled by the scream of the engine, dashes through the thicket -anunusual sight from the window of a railway carriage. Few evidences of human habitation are there, nor does the time seem ever likely to come when human enterprise will have overcome the difficulties that nature opposes to the conversion of these swamps into arable land. Here and there a rise of the ground has been taken advantage of, and the neat house of the planter, embowered in orange-trees loaded with golden fruit, and surrounded by a few acres of sugar plantation, show that energy is not wanting to do more, were it possible. And as the country improves, and alters slightly in character, and the bayous become more numerous and important, these plantations occur more frequently upon their banks; and then it is that we begin to discover that the same hospitality which we have already experienced on the rice-lands of South Carolina, will be cordially extended to us on the sugar plantations of Louisiana. As we are now beyond railways, we are compelled to pay our visits by water, and explore in a boat the labyrinth of bayous by which we are encompassed. The character of the vegetation is totally different from anything to which we are accustomed; the beautiful live oak fans with its quivering leaves the glassy surface of the bayou; the waving cypress, here the most valuable tree of the forest, fringes its margin; the sweet gum and common oak, smothered in creepers and Spanish moss, raise their lofty summits, and "look like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms." yellow hickory and fan-leaved palmetto and graceful cane conceal the sturdy trunks of the larger trees, which, meeting overhead, form an almost impenetrable shade as we glide beneath them alligators in numbers bask on the banks like stranded logs; bright-plumaged birds glance among the branches, and vie in their plumage with bright-coloured flowers. These were the bayous which the Acadian exiles threaded, and the description of which I recalled with interest as I passed among them. The "They too swerved from their course; and, entering the Bayou of Plaquemine, Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters, Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in mid-air Waved like banners that hung on the walls of ancient cathedrals." This moss is the most striking feature of the forest scenery. It clothes the whole woods in a garment of sober grey, so that at a distance the absence of vivid colouring almost pains the eye, and gives a sombre tone to the scenery. But I found an additional source of interest in following the windings of these waters; for as the Mississippi loses itself at last by means of these almost countless little channels, so it has its origin in a quantity of rivulets, no less numerous, flowing from the host of small lakes with which that part of Minnesota called the Hauteurs des Terres is thickly dotted. Some of |