CHAPTER II.
"Sweet flow thy waters, Ashley, and pleasant on thy banks |
The scene is very much altered now. Dorchester belongs to Ashley no longer. It is a name—a shadow. The people are gone; the site is distinguished by its ruins only. The owl hoots through the long night from the old church-tower, and the ancient woods and the quiet waters of the river give back, in melancholy echoes, his unnoted cries. The Carolinian looks on the spot with a saddened spirit. The trees crowd upon the ancient thoroughfare; the brown viper hisses from the venerable tomb, and the cattle graze along the clustering bricks that distinguish the ancient chimney-places. It is now one of those prospects that kindle poetry in the most insensible observer. It is one of the visible dwelling-places of Time; and the ruins that still mock, to a certain extent, his destructive progress, have in themselves a painful chronicle of capricious change and various affliction. They speak for the dead that lie beneath them in no stinted number; they record the leading features of a long history, crowded with vicissitudes.
But our purpose now is with the past, and not with the present. We go back to the time when the village of Dorchester was full of life, and crowded with inhabitants; when the coaches of the wealthy planters of the neighbourhood thronged the highway; when the bells from the steeple sweetly called to the Sabbath worship; and when, throughout the week, the shops were crowded with buyers, and the busy hammer of the mechanic, and the axe of the labourer, sent up their crowding noises, imaging, upon a small scale, many of
