Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/299

 devours her vitals. This weak, luxurious beauty is—South Carolina.

And after all, my Agatha, she is beautiful. I have inexpressibly enjoyed her peculiar charm, so delightful, so rich, and to me so novel.

I have been fourteen days here, and although the weather for the most part has been rainy, and is so still, yet there have been days when I have wished that all feeble, ailing humanity, (and you my Agatha above all,) could remove hither, breathe this air, see this exquisite pomp of heaven and earth, which must invigorate them like a balsam of life, and enjoy life anew. I can under stand how the mariners who first approached these shores, and felt these gentle breezes, this atmosphere, believed that they were drinking an elixir of life, and hoped to find here the fountain of perpetual youth.

During these delicious days I have made some excursions into the country, round the city, with Mrs. H., and some kind acquaintance. In all directions, after we had ploughed through an extent of deep sand—but they are now beginning everywhere to form wooden roads, which are very excellent to drive upon—we arrived at forest. And the forest here is a sort of paradisaical wilderness, or abounding with many kinds of trees and plants which I never before heard of or saw. Nothing is studied or trimmed, but everything grows in wild luxuriant disorder: myrtles and fir-trees, magnolias and cypresses, elms and oaks, and a great many foreign trees, the names of which I do not know. The most magnificent and the most abundant of all trees here is the live-oak, an evergreen, an immense tree, from the branches of which depending masses of moss, often three or four yards in length, (the Tillandsia Umvides) hung down in heavy draperies. These pendant grey masses upon the heavy branches produce the most unimaginably picturesque effect, and when these trees have been planted with any