e noble humanity; the honor which prefers death to a
stain, and the soul which never stoops to a lie, a fraud, or a meanness
degrading to a gentleman. They have been born upon the banks of the
great river of the world; they have seen all the developments of
talent, time, and enterprise which have made their country great as the
river through which it flows. Accustomed from infancy to look upon this
scene and these developments, their souls with their ideas have been
sublimated, and they are a population unsurpassed in the higher
attributes of humanity, and the nobler sympathies of man, by any on the
face of the earth--surrounded by wealth, tangible and substantial,
descending from generation to generation, affording to each all the
blessings wealth can give.

The spirit of hospitality and independence has ennobled the sons, as
hereditary wealth and privilege had the sires who planted this colony.
These sires laid the foundation of this wealth, in securing for their
posterity the broad acres of this fat-land where now they are to be
found. None have emigrated: conscious of possessing the noblest
heritage upon earth, they have remained to eliminate from this soil the
wealth which in such abundance they possess. As they were reared, they
have reared their sons; the lessons of truth, virtue, honor have borne
good fruit. None can say they ever knew a French Creole a confirmed
drunkard or a professional gambler. None ever knew an aberration of
virtue in a daughter of one.

The high-bred Creole lady is a model of refinement--modest, yet free in
her manners; chaste in her thoughts and deportment; generous in her
opinions, and full of charity; highly cultivated intellectually and by
association; familiar from travel with the society of Europe; mistress
of two, and frequently of half a dozen languages, versed in the
literature of all. Accustomed from infancy to deport themselves as
ladies, with a model before them in their mothers, they grow up with an
elevation of sentiment and a propriety of deportment which
distinguishes them as the most refined and polished ladies in the whole
country. There is with these a softness of deportment and delicacy of
expression, an abstinence from all violent and boisterous expressions
of their feelings and sentiments, and above all, the entire freedom
from petty scandal, which makes them lovely, and to be loved by every
honorable and high-bred gentleman who may chance to know them and
cultivate