These noble trees form a very striking and interesting feature in a Carolinian landscape, especially when at distant intervals they cast their broad shadows on the level spacious tracts of cleared land, which stretch to the distant forest without a fence, or the smallest perceptible undulation or variety of surface. They are not tall, but from twelve to eighteen feet in girth, and contain a prodigious quantity of timber. At the distance of fifteen or eighteen feet from the ground, they divide into three or four immense limbs, which grow nearly in a horizontal direction, or rather with a gentle curve, to the length of forty or fifty paces. The wood is almost incorruptible; and on this account, as well as from its furnishing, in its natural state, almost every curve which is required in the construction of a vessel, it is invaluable for naval purposes.

We dined at a neighbouring plantation, and after tea I had a pleasant téte-à-tête ride home through the woods with my venerable friend. We spent the evening very agreeably, in general conversation on American and European politics, and in examining various works on the botany and ornithology of America. My friend had an excellent library, comprising many recent and valuable British publications, and a

more extensive collection of English agricultural works than I ever saw in a private library before. The house is a very handsome one, and covers more ground than houses on a similar scale in England, as it is thought desirable in this climate to have only one room deep, with a profusion of windows, which do not put one in good humour with our window-tax. From the windows of the library and diningroom, the eye wandered over extensive ricefields, the surface of which is levelled with almost mathematical exactness, as it is necessary to overflow them at particular periods from various canals which intersect them, and which communicate with rivers whose waters are thrown back by the flowing of the tide.— At six o'clock this morning, I left my hospitable friend, who sent me in his carriage half way back to Charleston, to a spot where my servant and horses met me.

The few days previous to this excursion had been spent principally in visiting the different families with whom I have already made you acquainted, and who were particularly attentive to me. The best society here, though not very extensive, is much superior to any which I have yet seen in America. It consists of a few old patrician families, who form a select circle, into

which the "novi homines," unless distinguished by great personal merit, find it extremely difficult to gain admission. Strangers, well introduced, and of personal respectability, are received with much liberality and attention. Many of the old gentlemen were educated at English colleges, and retain something of their original attachment to the mother country, notwithstanding their sensibility to recent calumny and misrepresentation. Their manners are extremely agreeable, resembling the more polished of our country gentlemen, and are formed on the model of what in England we call "the old school." They are, however, the last of their generation, and will leave a blank much to be deplored when they pass away. The young ladies of the patrician families are delicate, refined, and intelligent, rather distant and reserved to strangers, but frank and affable to those who are familiarly introduced to them by their fathers and brothers. They go very early into company, are frequently married at sixteen or eighteen years of age, and generally under twenty, and have retired from the vortex of gay society, before even the fashionable part of my fair countrywomen would formerly have entered it. They often lament that the high standard of manners to which they have been

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accustomed seems doomed to perish with the generation of their fathers. The fact is, that the absence of the privileges of primogeniture, and the consequent repeated subdivision of property, are gradually effecting a change in the structure of society in South Carolina, and will shortly efface its most interesting and characteristic features.

I arrived at Charleston immediately after the races, which are a season of incessant gaiety. They usually take place in February, when all the principal families visit their town-houses in Charleston, for three or four weeks, collecting from their plantations, which are at a distance of from 30 to 150 miles. During this short interval, there is a perpetual round of visits. About the beginning of March, they return to the retirement of their plantations, often accompanied by the strangers with whom they have become acquainted. As a large proportion of the plantations are in the swamps, where a residence in the summer months would probably be fatal from a fever of a bilious nature, from which the natives themselves are not exempt, the families return about the beginning of June to the city, where they remain till the first frost, which is looked for with great anxiety towards October. They then go back to their

plantations until February. Some, instead of coming into the city in June, retire to the mountains, or to the springs of Ballston and Saratoga, in the State of New York, where a large concourse of persons assemble from every part of the United States and from Canada, and, by the reciprocation of civilities, and a better acquaintance with each other, gradually lose their sectional and colonial prejudices.Although these springs are from a thousand to fifteen hundred miles from the Southern States, the inhabitants of Georgia and Carolina speak of them with as much familiarity as our Londoners speak of Bath or Cheltenham. Some of the planters pass the hot months on Sullivan's Island, at the mouth of the Bay, where even strangers may generally remain with impunity. When those who decide to spend the summer in the city are once settled there, it is considered in the highest degree hazardous to sleep a single night in the country. The experiment is sometimes made, and occasionally with impunity, but all my informants concurred in assuring me that fatal consequences might generally be expected; and a most respectable friend told me, that if his family suspected him of such an intention, they would almost attempt to prevent it by actual force. The natives,