Of this fashion of conversation you may hear any desired amount at the South, by going among the right sort of people.  Let us take it for granted, without making impertinent inquiry, that nothing of the kind is ever uttered in any other country, whether in pot-house or parlor.  I suppose that such remarks seem very horrid to ladies and other gentle-minded folk, who perhaps never heard the like in their lives, and imagine, when they see the stuff on paper, that it is spoken with scowling brows, through set teeth, and out of a heart of red-hot passion.  The truth is, that these ferocious phrases are generally drawled forth in an ex-officio tone, as if the speaker were rather tired of that sort of thing, meant nothing very particular by it, and talked thus only as a matter of fashion.  It will be observed that the most violent of these politicians was a New-Yorker.  I am inclined to pronounce, also, that the two Georgians were by birth New-Englanders.  The Carolinian was the most moderate of the company, giving his attention chiefly to the game, and throwing out his one remark concerning the worrying of Greeley with an air of simply civil assent to the general meaning of the conversation, as an exchange of anti-abolition sentiments.  “If you will play that card,” he seemed to say, “I follow suit as a mere matter of course.”

There was a second attempt to haul us off at sunset, and a third in the morning, both unsuccessful.  Each tide, though stormless, carried the Columbia a little higher up the beach; and the tugs, trying singly to move her, only broke their hawsers and wasted precious time.  Fortunately, the sea continued smooth, so that the ship escaped a pounding.  On Saturday, at eleven, twenty-eight hours after we struck, all hope of getting off without discharging cargo having been abandoned, we passengers were landed on Sullivan’s Island, to make our way back to Charleston.  Our baggage was forwarded to the ferry in carts, and we followed at leisure on foot.  In company with Georgian First and a gentleman from Brooklyn, I strolled over the sand-rolls, damp and hard now with a week’s rain, passed one or two of the tenantless summer-houses, and halted beside the glacis of Fort Moultrie.  I do not wonder that Major Anderson did not consider his small force safe within this fortification.  It is overlooked by neighboring sand-hills and by the houses of Moultrieville, which closely surround it on the land side, while its ditch is so narrow and its rampart so low that a ladder of twenty-five feet in length would reach from the outside of the former to the summit of the latter.  A fire of sharp-shooters from the commanding points, and two columns of attack, would have crushed the feeble garrison.  No military movement could be more natural than the retreat to Fort Sumter.  What puzzles one, especially on the spot, and what nobody in Charleston could explain to me, is the fact that this manoeuvre could be executed unobserved by the people of Moultrieville, few as they are, and by the guard-boats which patrolled the harbor.