as we passed onward.  To the south was the long, low, gray Morris Island, with its extinguished lighthouse, its tuft or two of pines, its few dwellings, and its invisible batteries.  To the north was the long, low, gray Sullivan’s Island, a repetition of the other, with the distinctions of higher sand-rolls, a village, a regular fort, and palmettos.  We passed the huge brown Moultrie House, in summer a gay resort, at present a barrack; passed the hundred scattered cottages of the island, mostly untenanted now, and looking among the sand-drifts as if they had been washed ashore at random; passed the low walls of Fort Moultrie, once visibly yellow, but now almost hidden by the new glacis, and surmounted by piles of barrels and bags of sand, with here and there palmetto stockades as a casing for the improvised embrasures; passed its black guns, its solidly built, but rusty barracks, and its weather-worn palmetto flag waving from a temporary flag-staff.  On the opposite side of the harbor was Fort Johnstone, a low point, exhibiting a barrack, a few houses, and a sand redoubt, with three forty-two pounders.  And here, in the midst of all things, apparent master of all things, at the entrance of the harbor proper, and nearly equidistant from either shore, though nearest the southern, frowned Fort Sumter, a huge and lofty and solid mass of brickwork with stone embrasures, all rising from a foundation of ragged granite boulders washed by the tides.  The port-holes were closed; a dozen or so of monstrous cannon peeped from the summit; two or three sentinels paced slowly along the parapet; the stars and stripes blew out from the lofty flag-staff.  The plan of Fort Sumter may be briefly described as five-sided, with each angle just so much truncated as to give room for one embrasure in every story.  Its whole air is massive, commanding, and formidable.

Eighty or a hundred citizens, volunteers, cadets from the military academy, policemen, and negroes, greeted the arrival of the Columbia at her wharf.  It was a larger crowd than usual, partly because a report had circulated that we should be forced to bring to off Fort Sumter and give an account of ourselves, and partly because many persons in Charleston have lately been perplexed with an abundant leisure.  As I drove to my hotel, I noticed that the streets showed less movement of business and population than when I knew them four years ago.  The place seemed dirtier, too,—­worse paved, shabbier as to its brick-work and stucco, and worse painted,—­but whether through real deterioration, or by comparison with the neatly finished city which I had lately left, I cannot decide.  There was surely not a third of the usual shipping, nor a quarter of the accustomed cotton.  Here and there were wharves perfectly bare, not only of masting and of freight, but even of dust, as if they had not been used for days, or possibly for weeks.