The life of the low-country South Carolina planter, until broken up by the war, had changed but little since colonial times.  It was the life which Washington lived at Mount Vernon, with some slight differences of local custom.  The two-storied house, with its ten or twenty rooms and broad piazza, had probably been built in ante-Revolutionary days by the British country gentleman or Huguenot exile from whom the present owner drew his descent.  I well remember how the old house at Hanover bore near the top of the chimney stack the legend “Peu a peu” written with a stick in the soft mortar with which the bricks had been covered.  The old Huguenot builder had burned his bricks by guess, and three times the work had to stop until the kiln could be replenished and a new lot prepared.  The top was finally reached, however, and the triumphant Peu a peu was only his French way of proclaiming to posterity Perseverantia vincit omnia.  In many instances, however, fire has destroyed the original structure—­a danger to which the country residence is specially exposed—­but the new one has usually been modeled after that which it succeeded.  Indian names, flowing softly from the tongue, have usually come down with the tracts to which they originally belonged, as Pooshee, Wantoot, Wampee, Wapahoula, though Chelsea, White Hall, Sarrazin’s or Sans Souci often betrays the English or French origin of the first patentee.

To understand the home and life of the wealthy Carolina planter we must remember that he was the most contented man in the world.  The greed of gain was unknown to him, and his deep-rooted conservatism forbade everything like speculation.  Solid, substantial comfort and large-hearted hospitality were the objects in all his expenditures.  He never invested his surplus money except in another plantation to put his surplus negroes on, for he never sold a negro except for incorrigible bad qualities or to pay some pressing debt.  He had no expensive tastes except for rare old madeira and racing-stock, from the last of which his splendid saddle-horses were always selected; and these were usually of the best and purest blood.  He was as much at home in the saddle as an English fox-hunter or a Don Cossack, and the only wheeled vehicles in his spacious carriage-house were the heavy family coach, and the light sulky in which his summer trips were made between the pineland and the plantation.

Come back with me now to the days when the North-eastern Railroad was a possibility of the future, and join me in a Christmas visit to old Pooshee.  We take the little steamer for the head of Cooper River, the December sun being warm enough to tempt us from the close cabin to the airy deck.  The graceful spire of old St. Michael’s cuts sharply against the sky, reminding you, if you have visited the suburbs of London, of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, that fine specimen of Sir Christopher Wren’s style, after which it was modeled.  The old customhouse