literary ability, and I heard from many
quarters, after I had left New Orleans, that the society of this
lady was highly valued by all persons of talent. Yet were I,
traveller-like, to stop here, and set it down as a national
peculiarity, or republican custom, that milliners took the lead
in the best society, I should greatly falsify facts. I do not
remember the same thing happening to me again, and this is one
instance among a thousand, of the impression every circumstance
makes on entering a new country, and of the propensity, so
irresistible, to class all things, however accidental, as
national and peculiar. On the other hand, however, it is certain
that if similar anomalies are unfrequent in America, they are
nearly impossible elsewhere.

In the shop of Miss C-- I was introduced to Mr. M'Clure, a
venerable personage, of gentlemanlike appearance, who in the
course of five minutes propounded as many axioms, as "Ignorance
is the only devil;" "Man makes his own existence;" and the like.
He was of the New Harmony school, or rather the New Harmony
school was of him. He was a man of good fortune, (a Scotchman, I
believe), who after living a tolerably gay life, had "conceived
high thoughts, such as Lycurgus loved, who bade flog the little
Spartans," and determined to benefit the species, and immortalize
himself, by founding a philosophical school at New Harmony.
There was something in the hollow square legislations of Mr.
Owen, that struck him as admirable, and he seems, as far as I can
understand, to have intended aiding his views, by a sort of
incipient hollow square drilling; teaching the young ideas of all
he could catch, to shoot into parallelogramic form and order.
This venerable philosopher, like all of his school that I ever
heard of, loved better to originate lofty imaginings of faultless
systems, than to watch their application to practice. With much
liberality he purchased and conveyed to the wilderness a very
noble collection of books and scientific instruments; but not
finding among men one whose views were liberal and enlarged as
his own, he selected a woman to put into action the machine he
had organized. As his acquaintance with this lady had been of
long standing, and, as it was said, very intimate, he felt sure
that no violation of his rules would have place under her sway;
they would act together as one being: he was to perform the
functions of the soul, and will everything; she, those of the
bo