to New
Orleans, where my father invested his money so securely in the banking
business that he was never able to get any of it out again. But of this
hereafter.

I was only eighteen months old at the time of the removal, and it didn't
make much difference to me where I was, because I was so small; but
several years later, when my father proposed to take me North to be
educated, I had my own peculiar views on the subject. I instantly kicked
over the little Negro boy who happened to be standing by me at the
moment, and, stamping my foot violently on the floor of the piazza,
declared that I would not be taken away to live among a lot of Yankees!

You see I was what is called "a Northern man with Southern principles."
I had no recollection of New England: my earliest memories were
connected with the South, with Aunt Chloe, my old Negro nurse, and
with the great ill-kept garden in the centre of which stood our house--a
whitewashed stone house it was, with wide verandas--shut out from the
street by lines of orange, fig, and magnolia trees. I knew I was born
at the North, but hoped nobody would find it out. I looked upon the
misfortune as something so shrouded by time and distance that maybe
nobody remembered it. I never told my schoolmates I was a Yankee,
because they talked about the Yankees in such a scornful way it made
me feel that it was quite a disgrace not to be born in Louisiana, or at
least in one of the Border States. And this impression was strengthened
by Aunt Chloe, who said, "dar wasn't no gentl'men in the Norf no way,"
and on one occasion terrified me beyond measure by declaring that,
"if any of dem mean whites tried to git her away from marster, she was
jes'gwine to knock 'em on de head wid a gourd!"

The way this poor creature's eyes flashed, and the tragic air with which
she struck at an imaginary "mean white," are among the most vivid things
in my memory of those days.

To be frank, my idea of the North was about as accurate as that
entertained by the well-educated Englishmen of the present day
concerning America. I supposed the inhabitants were divided into two
classes--Indians and white people; that the Indians occasionally dashed
down on New York, and scalped any woman or child (giving the preference
to children) whom they caught lingering in the outskirts after
nightfall; that the white men were either hunters or schoolmasters, and
that it was winter pretty much all the year round. The prevailing s