The spacious houses are surrounded with broad piazzas, often a piazza to each story, for the sake of shade and coolness, and each house generally stands by itself in a garden planted with trees and shrubs, many of which preserve their verdure through the winter.  We saw early flowers already opening; the peach and plum-tree were in full bloom; and the wild orange, as they call the cherry-laurel, was just putting forth its blossoms.  The buildings—­some with stuccoed walls, some built of large dark-red bricks, and some of wood—­are not kept fresh with paint like ours, but are allowed to become weather-stained by the humid climate, like those of the European towns.  The streets are broad and quiet, unpaved in some parts, but in none, as with us, offensive both to sight and smell.  The public buildings are numerous for the size of the city, and well-built in general, with sufficient space about them to give them a noble aspect, and all the advantage which they could derive from their architecture.  The inhabitants, judging from what I have seen of them, which is not much, I confess, do not appear undeserving of the character which has been given them, of possessing the most polished and agreeable manners of all the American cities.

I may shortly write you again from the interior of South Carolina.

Letter XI.

The Interior of South Carolina.  A Corn-Shucking.

Barnwell District, South Carolina, March 29, 1843.

Since I last wrote, I have passed three weeks in the interior of South Carolina; visited Columbia, the capital of the state, a pretty town; roamed over a considerable part of Barnwell district, with some part of the neighboring one of Orangeburg; enjoyed the hospitality of the planters—­very agreeable and intelligent men; been out in a racoon hunt; been present at a corn-shucking; listened to negro ballads, negro jokes, and the banjo; witnessed negro dances; seen two alligators at least, and eaten bushels of hominy.

Whoever comes out on the railroad to this district, a distance of seventy miles or more, if he were to judge only by what he sees in his passage, might naturally take South Carolina for a vast pine-forest, with here and there a clearing made by some enterprising settler, and would wonder where the cotton which clothes so many millions of the human race, is produced.  The railway keeps on a tract of sterile sand, overgrown with pines; passing, here and there, along the edge of a morass, or crossing a stream of yellow water.  A lonely log-house under these old trees, is a sight for sore eyes; and only two or three plantations, properly so called, meet the eye in the whole distance.  The cultivated and more productive lands lie apart from this tract, near streams, and interspersed with more frequent ponds and marshes.  Here you find plantations comprising several thousands of acres, a considerable part of which always lies in forest;