his ordinary
fashion, these States, it is true, might long continue mines of wealth,
to be wrought by a succession of adventurers; but never would they
become what Providence has evidently designed they shall be,--great
countries, powerful governments, and the home of millions of freemen yet
unborn.

These men seek wealth from the soil to return it back to the soil, with
the addition of the sweat of their brows tracking every newly-broken
furrow. Their pride does not consist in fine houses, fine raiment,
costly services of plate, or refined cookery: they live in humble
dwellings of wood, wear the coarsest habits, and live on the plainest
fare. It is their pride to have planted an additional acre of
cane-brake, to have won a few feet from the river, or cleared a thousand
trees from the forest; to have added a couple of slaves to their family,
or a horse of high blood to their stable.

It is for these things that they labour from year to year. Unconscious
agents in the hands of the Almighty, it is to advance the great cause of
civilization, whose pioneers they are, that they endure toil for their
lives, without the prospect of reaping any one personal advantage which
might not have been attained in the first ten years of their labour.

It is not through ignorance either that they continue in these simple
and rude habits of life. Most of these planters visit the Northern
States periodically, as well as New Orleans; their wealth, and the
necessity the merchant feels to conciliate their good-will, makes them
the ready guests at tables where every luxury and refinement abounds:
but they view these without evincing the least desire to imitate them,
prefer generally the most ordinary liquids to the finest-flavoured
wines, and, as guests, are much easier to please than to catch; for not
only do they appear indifferent to these luxuries, but they seek to
avoid them, contemn their use, and return to their log-houses and the
cane-brake to seek in labour for enjoyment.

There must, however, be a great charm in the unrestrained freedom of
this sort of life; since I have frequently met women, who were bred in
the North, well educated, and accustomed for years to all the _agremens_
of good society, who yet assured me that they were happiest when living
in the solitude of their plantation, and only felt dull whilst wandering
about the country or recruiting at some public watering-place.

The great drawback to these frontiers, and o