is over,
three quarters of an hour spent in strolling round the church among the
crowd, in which time you will be invited by several different gentlemen
home with them to dinner."

[Footnote 15: Philip V. Fithian, _Journal and Letters_ (Princeton, 1900),
p. 287.]

[Footnote 16: Fithian _Journal and Letters_, p. 296.]

Van Buren found the towns in the Yazoo Valley so small as barely to be
entitled to places on the map; he found the planters' houses to be commonly
mere log structures, as the farmers' houses about his own home in Michigan
had been twenty years before; and he found the roads so bad that the mule
teams could hardly draw their wagons nor the spans of horses their chariots
except in dry weather. But when on his horseback errands in search of a
position he learned to halloo from the roadway and was regularly met at
each gate with an extended hand and a friendly "How do you do, sir? Won't
you alight, come in, take a seat and sit awhile?"; when he was invariably
made a member of any circle gathered on the porch and refreshed with cool
water from the cocoanut dipper or with any other beverages in circulation;
when he was asked as a matter of course to share any meal in prospect and
to spend the night or day, he discovered charms even in the crudities of
the pegs for hanging saddles on the porch and the crevices between the logs
of the wall for the keeping of pipes and tobacco, books and newspapers.
Finally, when the planter whose house he had made headquarters for two
months declined to accept a penny in payment, Van Buren's heart overflowed.
The boys whom he then began to teach he found particularly apt in
historical studies, and their parents with whom he dwelt were thorough
gentlefolk.

Toward the end of his narrative, Van Buren expressed the thought that
Mississippi, the newly settled home of people from all the older Southern
states, exemplified the manners of all. He was therefore prompted to
generalize and interpret: "A Southern gentleman is composed of the same
material that a Northern gentleman is, only it is tempered by a Southern
clime and mode of life. And if in this temperament there is a little more
urbanity and chivalry, a little more politeness and devotion to the ladies,
a little more _suaviter in modo_, why it is theirs--be fair and acknowledge
it, and let them have it. He is from the mode of life he lives, especially
at home, more or less a cavalier; he invariably goes a-horseback. His boot