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.  Here on a Saturday afternoon, for that is their stated time of assembling, I was introduced to some of the most distinguished citizens of Savannah, and witnessed the skill with which they threw the discus.  No apprentices were they in the art; there was no striking far from the stake, no sending the discus rolling over the green; they heaped the quoits as snugly around the stakes as if the amusement had been their profession.