he fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the
means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental
attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The
country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes,
was sublimely grand, and seemed to inspire ideas and aspirations
commensurate with its own majesty in the people upon its borders.

In no country are to be found women of more refined character, more
beauty, or more elegance of manners, than among the planters' wives and
daughters of the Mississippi coast. Reared in the country, and
accustomed to exercise in the open air, in walking through the shady
avenues of the extensive and beautifully ornamented grounds about the
home or plantation-house; riding on horseback along the river's margin,
elevated upon the levee, covered with the green Bermuda grass, smoothly
spreading over all the ground, save the pretty open road, stretching
through this grass, like a thread of silver in a a cloth of green; with
the great drab river, moving in silent majesty, on one side, and the
extended fields of the plantation, teeming with the crop of cane or
cotton, upon the other. Their exercise, thus surrounded, becomes a
school, and their ideas expand and grow with the sublimity of their
surroundings. The health-giving exercise and the wonderful scene yields
vigor both to mind and body. Nor is this scene, or its effects, greater
in the development of mind and body than that of the hill-country of
the river-counties of Mississippi.

These hills are peculiar. They are drift, thrown upon the primitive
formation by some natural convulsion, and usually extend some twelve or
fifteen miles into the interior. They consist of a rich, marly loam,
and, when in a state of nature were clothed to their summits with the
wild cane, dense and unusually large, a forest of magnolia, black
walnut, immense oaks, and tulip or poplar-trees, with gigantic vines of
the wild grape climbing and overtopping the tallest of these forest
monarchs. Here among these picturesque hills and glorious woods, the
emigrants fixed their homes, and here grew their posterity surrounding
themselves with wealth, comforts, and all the luxuries and elegances of
an elevated civilization. Surrounded in these homes with domestic
slaves reared in them, and about them, who came at their bidding, and
went when told, but who were carefully regarded, sustained, and
protected, and who felt their f