Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/405

Rh pretty nevertheless, and situated in a broad bend of the Savannah. Around it are many charming country-houses with their gardens. I visited several such; saw beautiful and earnest family groups; and heard the hundred-tongued birds singing in the oak-woods. Of oaks, such as our Swedish oak, I find none; but many other kinds of oaks, of which the live-oak, with its delicately cut oval leaf, is the most splendid kind.

During my stay at Augusta, I have been for some time deliberating upon an excursion which I proposed to make northward. I wished greatly to visit the highlands of Georgia, and Tellulah Falls in that district, which had been described to me in Charleston as the most picturesque in America. I should like to have seen that original, who a few years since built the first inn at the falls, and who christened his eldest daughter Magnolia Grandiflora, his second Tellulah Falls, and his son some other curious name which I have forgotten. I had already half determined to undertake the journey, and a kind, young lady had given me letters to her friends in Athens and Rome, places on the road to Tellulah Falls, and which I presume are related in about the same degree to the great of these names, as we probably are to Adam and Eve; but the heat became great, and I felt myself so weak in consequence of it, and the journey would have been so fatiguing, that Igave it up, and determined instead to go back to Charleston by way of Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and which I have been told has a remarkably beautiful site in the neighbourhood of the highlands.

Having promised to return, I parted from my kind entertainers, thankful for the residence in their house, and for that which the residence in Augusta had given me, of gold, better than that of California.

The excellent, agreeable Mr. B. accompanied me a short distance to the railroad, on the other side of the