ious wilderness of dismantled crumbling grey walls
compassionately cloaked with a thousand profuse and graceful creepers.
These are the only ruins properly so called, except those of Fort Putnam,
that I have ever seen in this land of contemptuous youth. I hailed these
picturesque groups and masses with the feelings of a European, to whom
ruins are like a sort of relations. In my country, ruins are like a minor
chord in music, here they are like a discord; they are not the relics of
time, but the results of violence; they recall no valuable memories of a
remote past, and are mere encumbrances to the busy present. Evidently they
are out of place in America, except on St. Simon's Island, between this
savage selvage of civilisation and the great Atlantic deep. These heaps of
rubbish and roses would have made the fortune of a sketcher; but I imagine
the snakes have it all to themselves here, and are undisturbed by camp
stools, white umbrellas, and ejaculatory young ladies.

I sat for a long time with Mrs. A----, and a friend of hers staying with
her, a Mrs. A----, lately from Florida. The latter seemed to me a
remarkable woman; her conversation was extremely interesting. She had been
stopping at Brunswick, at the hotel where Dr. H---- murdered young W----,
and said that the mingled ferocity and blackguardism of the men who
frequented the house had induced her to cut short her stay there, and come
on to her friend Mrs. A----'s. We spoke of that terrible crime which had
occurred only the day after she left Brunswick, and both ladies agreed
that there was not the slightest chance of Dr. H----'s being punished in
any way for the murder he had committed; that shooting down a man who had
offended you was part of the morals and manners of the southern gentry,
and that the circumstance was one of quite too frequent occurrence to
cause any sensation, even in the small community where it obliterated one
of the principal members of the society. If the accounts given by these
ladies of the character of the planters in this part of the south may be
believed, they must be as idle, arrogant, ignorant, dissolute, and
ferocious as that mediaeval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing
themselves; and these are southern women, and should know the people among
whom they live.

We had a long discussion on the subject of slavery, and they took as
usual the old ground of justifying the system, _where_ it was administered
with kindness and in