manners and the elegance
of his conversation. This peculiarity was not alone confined to the
gentlemen. The ladies were familiar with every household duty, and
attended to them: they caught from their husbands and brothers the open
frankness of their bearing and conversation, a confident, yet not a
bold or offensive bearing in their homes and in society, with a
polished refinement and an elevation of sentiment in all they said or
did, which made them to me the most charming and lovely of their
sex--and which made Mississippi forty years ago the most desirable
place of rural residence in the Union.

The conduct of these people was universally lofty and honorable. A
fawning sycophancy or little meannesses were unknown; social
intercourse was unrestrained because all were honorable, and that
reserve which so plainly speaks suspicion of your company was never
seen. There was no habit of canvassing the demerits of a neighbor or
his affairs. The little backbitings and petty slanders which so
frequently mar the harmony of communities, was never indulged or
tolerated. Homogeneous in its character, the population was harmonious.
United in the same pursuits, the emulation was kind and honorable. The
tone and purity was superior to low and debasing vices, and these and
their concomitants were unknown. There were few dram-shops or places of
low resort, and these only for the lower and more debased of the
community. Fortunately, fifty years ago, there were but few such
characters, no meetings for gaming or debauchery, and the social
communion of the people was chaste and cordial at their hospitable and
elegant homes.

A peculiar feature of the society of the river counties was the perfect
freedom of manners, and yet the high polish, the absence of
neighborhood discord, and the strict regard for personal and pecuniary
rights: a sort of universal confidence pervaded every community, and in
every transaction personal honor supplied the place of litigation.
Strangers of respectable appearance were not met with apparent
suspicion, but with hospitable kindness; and especially was this the
case toward young men who professedly came in search of a new home and
new fields for the exercise of their abilities professionally, or for
the more profitable employment of any means they might to have brought
to the country. Now, at seventy years of age, and after the experience
of half a century of men and society in almost every portion of the
Un