... In the autumn of 1853, when I was seventeen, we were all at Danskammer [their home in NY] when my three brothers decided to spend the winter in Charleston. I see now that I ought either to have gone to school again somewhere or entered college, but my brothers thought it would be a good plan for me also to spend the winter in South Carolina, particularly as Mrs. Martin Wilkins, who lived in Charleston, had asked me to stay with her. My brothers suggested that I could take my books along and study just as well there as anywhere else. So a little later I went by steamer to Charleston; it was my first experience of the sea and I was very seasick, but when I arrived I was delighted with the semi-tropic climate of Carolina after the November landscape I had left at home. The Wilkinses received me at
their house in Charleston, a nice old-fashioned house like many others in the town, with an entrance-hall running on one side the whole length of the house, and the parlor and other rooms opening on it. Mrs. Wilkins, who had been a Miss Grimble, was a sweet and gentle old lady, a great friend of my mother's. Her husband, Uncle Gouv Wilkins's brother, had died, leaving her with three sons and three daughters:
- Gouverneur had just graduated from Yale and was a planter,
- Martin was a lawyer, and
- Berkeley was in business in Charleston;
- Eiza I knew already, for she had stayed with us at Danskammer, a charming girl just growing up, and
- the other two girls were still younger, both of them pretty. The Civil War came on soon after they grew up, the family suffered losses, and these lovely girls never married. ...
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