day send the whole city into
mourning; that patrician families had discharged their foreign cooks and
put their daughters into the kitchen; that there were no concerts, no
balls, and no marriages. Even the volunteers exhibited little of the
pomp and vanity of war. The small French military cap was often the only
sign of their present profession. The uniform, when it appeared, was
frequently a coarse homespun gray, charily trimmed with red worsted, and
stained with the rains and earth of the islands. One young dragoon in
this sober dress walked into our hotel, trailing the clinking steel
scabbard of his sabre across the marble floor of the vestibule with a
warlike rattle which reminded me of the Austrian officers whom I used
to see, yes, and hear, stalking about the _cafe's_ of Florence. Half a
dozen surrounded him to look at and talk about the weapon. A portly,
middle-aged legislator must draw it and cut and thrust, with a smile of
boyish satisfaction between his grizzled whiskers, bringing the point so
near my nose, in his careless eagerness, that I had to fall back upon
a stronger, that is, a more distant position. Then half a dozen others
must do likewise, their eyes sparkling like those of children examining
a new toy.

"It's not very sharp," said one, running his thumb carefully along the
edge of the narrow and rather light blade.

"Sharp enough to cut a man's head open," averred the dragoon.

"Well, it's a dam' shame that sixty-five men tharr in Sumter should make
such an expense to the State," declared a stout, blonde young rifleman,
speaking with a burr which proclaimed him from the up-country. "We
haven't even troyed to get 'em out. We ought at least to make a troyal."

All strangers at Charleston walk to the Battery. It is the extreme point
of the city peninsula, its right facing on the Ashley, its left on the
Cooper, and its outlook commanding the entire harbor, with Fort Sumter,
Port Pinckney, Fort Moultrie, and Fort Johnstone in the distance. Plots
of thin clover, a perfect wonder in this grassless land; promenades,
neatly fenced, and covered with broken shells instead of gravel; a
handsome bronze lantern-stand, twenty-five feet high, meant for a
beacon; a long and solid stone quay, the finest sea-walk in the United
States; a background of the best houses in Charleston, three-storied and
faced with verandas: such are the features of the Battery. Lately
four large iron guns, mounted like field-pieces, fo