Physically the Low Country retains its glamorous air under the scourings and sweepings of industrial change. 'Down on the salt,' as they say, the sea-islands still offer their long, palmetto-fringed beaches and their wide green marshes to the enormous sky. A little way inland the dense woods hung with grey Spanish moss, the nostalgic ruins of plantation houses destroyed by war or fire, the cypress pools of clear black water in which the herons stand like fabulous white blooms on their stalks — these trappings of the Gothic romances have their old power to stir the imagination.