The ‘man of prayer’ was a tall, lean, raw-boned, angular-built individual, with a thin, sharp, hatchet-face, a small sunken eye, and long, loose hair, brushed back and falling over the collar of a seedy black coat.  He looked like nothing in the world I have ever seen, and his pale, sallow face, and cracked, wheezy voice, were in comic keeping with his discourse.  His text was:  ’Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.’  And addressing the motley gathering of poor whites and small-planters before him as the ‘chosen people of God,’ he urged them to press on in the mad course their State had chosen.  It was a political harangue, a genuine stump-speech, but its frequent allusion to the auditory as the legitimate children of the old patriarch, and the rightful heirs of all the promises, struck me as out of place in a rural district of South-Carolina, however appropriate it might have been in one of the large towns, before an audience of merchants and traders, who are, almost to a man, Jews.

The services over, the congregation slowly left the church.  Gathered in groups in front of the ‘meeting-house,’ they were engaging in a general discussion of the affairs of the day, when the Colonel and I emerged from the doorway.  The better class greeted my host with considerable cordiality, but I noticed that the well-to-do, small planters, who composed the greater part of the assemblage, received him with decided coolness.  These people were the ‘North county folks’ on whom the overseer had invoked a hanging.  Except that their clothing was more uncouth and ill-fashioned, and their faces generally less ‘cute’ of expression, they did not differ materially in appearance from the rustic citizens who may be seen on any pleasant Sunday gathered around the door-ways of the rural meeting-houses of New-England.

One of them, who was leaning against a tree, quietly lighting a pipe, was a fair type of the whole, and as he took a part in the scene which followed, I will describe him.  He was tall and spare, with a swinging, awkward gait, and a wiry, athletic frame.  His hair, which he wore almost as long as a woman’s, was coarse and black, and his face strongly marked, and of the precise color of two small rivulets of tobacco-juice that escaped from the corners of his mouth.  He had an easy, self-possessed manner, and a careless, devil-may-care way about him, that showed he had measured his powers, and was accustomed to ‘rough it’ with the world.  He wore a broadcloth coat of the fashion of some years ago, but his waistcoat and nether garments of the common, reddish homespun, were loose and ill-shaped, as if their owner did not waste thought on such trifles.  His hat, as shockingly bad as Horace Greeley’s, had the inevitable broad brim, and fell over his face like a calash-awning over a shop-window.  As I approached him he extended his hand with a pleasant ‘How are ye, stranger?.’

‘Very well,’ I replied, returning his grasp with equal warmth, ’how are you?’