Up to this point the country is rolling and the soil rich. On the north a range of hills has been visible since morning, which in its progress farther west takes the name of San Saba. Between the Quihi and the Alamos, a distance of four or five miles, the roadway is bordered by a species of sumach, though very little like the plant of that name found at the north. Its leaves are mixed with tobacco by the Indians, and are found to be agreeable for smoking: it thus forms an article of traffic.

A solitary house stands on the west bank of the Quihi, the pattern for a German settlement, where we were fortunate enough to procure a quarter of a pound of butter for the quid pro quo of the same fraction of a dollar, while others purchased a few eggs at the same liberal rate. The sellers were German women, who although unable to understand English, found no difficulty in apprehending our wants, through the medium of the universal interpreter-cash. From the Alamos to the Hondo, the distance is about seven miles: the country generally stony and broken. It abounds principally in Texas live oak, in other words, a scraggy, stunted, knotty, and crooked specimen of the quercus virens, which probably grows nowhere else, and even here is a cumberer of the earth.

The Hondo at present appears to have lost the character of a stream, and consists only of a series of basins formed in the limestone rock, evaporation and the current having probably broken the connection, though it is not impossible there may be a subterraneous channel. Some of the party have secured fish enough for supper, but the angler not being of my mess we are without perch. This evening we were enabled to enjoy a most delicious bath, in one of the marble basins, as it were, to which the Hondo here accommodates itself. The pool or fountain is bounded on one side by a rock rising almost perpendicularly to the height of twenty-five or thirty feet, while the other

is approached by a gentle slope, descending in the water to a depth of five feet. It is impossible to conceive any thing more delightfully arranged for the luxury of a bath. The water is a perfect transparency, revealing the pebbles of the bottom with the distinctness of day-light. The scenery on a small scale is surpassingly beautiful, and a succession of such spots, with a fertile and productive country around, might justify the erection of country seats and villas vying with those of the Delaware and the Hudson.

It is a received fact among prairie travellers and the inhabitants of Texas generally, and is therefore recorded for what it may be worth on such highly respectable authority, that a hair rope, stretched upon the ground so as to envelope the person, is a sovereign protection against snakes. This, it is said, may be demonstrated by placing a snake within a circle of rope, and then attempting to drive him over it. The result is, according to the testimony aforesaid, that as soon as his head touches the hair, he turns aside in disgust, and takes a new direction. This may or may not be a fiction; but even the incredulous are not unwilling to avail themselves of a doubtful truth, though the success of the experiment may depend entirely on faith. One of the party last evening proposed to appropriate to himself at once the advantages of this remarkable prairie discovery in physics and natural history, and accordingly after going to bed requested that he might be surrounded and protected from nocturnal invasion, by this magic girdle. On awaking the following morning he was somewhat surprised to find four uprights planted near his bed, from which the rope was suspended in a series of graceful festoons, the lowest point being a foot or two from the ground. The sleeper at any rate was not disturbed by snakes, and the success attending the experiment renders it not impossible that the hair may be just as effectual above the ground as upon it. Of course the rope was hung by an Irishman.

AMERICANS of the present day give

little thought to the past: the age is an age of progress-forests are to be hewi down, rivers spanned with bridges, railroads and canals to be webbed all across the land. The practical overthrows and puts to rout what, for the want of a better word, we must style the poetical. The poetry most popular with the men to-day, is that of marble custom-houses, telegraphs, and iron horses annihilating space and time for us. This is the new American poesy, and it recommends itself more powerfully to the advocates of progress, than all the chants of Homer and Ariosto.

Let us not complain of it-it is not unworthy of the admiration of its disciples; but still we may find both pleasure and profit in occasionally losing sight of the great elements of wealth and power around us, of the telegraph, the railway, the thoughts that shake mankind". giving our attention for a space to the past times of the land we live in. Justly proud as we may be of what our era has accomplished, it is not the part of true philosophy to disregard the past. Rather let us endeavor to penetrate its character, and derive from it a lesson :-from its bright deeds and celebrated men, the models for our own lives, from its ignorance and weakness, a warning to avoid such ourselves.

But it is not an easy thing to return to former days, and realize in their full force those strange peculiarities of character which made them so different from our own times. Books scarcely furnish us any assistance :-mere historical facts are like skeletons, which, doubtless were a genuine portion of the body now crumbled into dust, but can afford no adequate idea of the once living and breathing form-of the bright eye, the eloquent lip, the locks around the forehead, the graceful and easy movement of the limbs. To get at the blood of history we must seek elsewhere: -we must explore old letter-chests: go into dark closets where mouldering doublets, and rust-eaten swords have long been suspended, the prey of oblivion and the moth; scan the odd costumes, and the noble features of old dusty portraits, which leave a white space on the wall when they are taken down. In presence of these objects, the past again revives in some degree; their warmth penetrates the yellow parchment, and the sympathetic traces

slowly reveal themselves :-for the first time we begin to realize the fact, that this elder day actually existed, characterized by a thousand peculiarities of thought and usage quite as good or bad, as admirable or ridiculous as the habitudes of our own era. The old sword flashed above the head of some valiant soldier, in times beyond the recollection of any one of the present generation. The rusty doublet, with its hanging cuffs and embroidery, enveloped the broad shoulders of some well-known ancestor, as he moved nimbly in the gavotte and reel, or bowed low in the stately minuet: the discolored portrait was "considered an excellent likeness of that ruffled and be-powdered worthy, now almost as completely forgotten as the painter, whose name the merciless hand of time has obliterated from the canvas. The sword, and doublet, and portrait, assist the imagination powerfully, indeed seem to open and illuminate some hidden crypt of memory. Looking upon them, we are carried away from the present to the past-just as we return almost in reality to some scene of sorrow or joy as we listen to the strain of music associated with it in our memories.

There are great numbers of these portraits in Virginia homes: in the broad halls of some mansions, they completely banish the deer-antlers, fishing-rods, guns, and pictures of celebrated races, immemorial ornaments of halls generally. Ranged in long lines, they look down perseveringly with never-winking eyes upon the hurrying, bustling household: comprehending, you would say, plainly, every thing which is going on before them, but forbidden by some magical spell, to speak, or close their eyes, or move. There are chevaliers of the time of Captain Smith, with bright steel cuirasses and ferocious fringes on their upper lips-ladies with high towers of lace and curls reared on their heads: and courtly gentlemen with ruffles and cocked-hats, and hair gathered in a queue behind, and tied with bows of ribbon. Some grasp swords, others rest their white hands, heavily ruffled as in Vandyke's pictures, on excellently bound booksothers again hold hunting horns burnished still by the bright October sunlight. The soft-eyed dames float in clouds of pale saffron lace, and sparkle all over with diamond bracelets, breastpins, and rings: they hold in their delicate taper fingers rose-buds and other flowers; or else caress

with snowy hands the narrow heads of greyhounds, or curling backs of little poodle-dogs. There they all are quite as natural as life. We have read of them in books, and gazed upon their portraits, but who has seen them in their homes?

No one of the present generation :-for alas! those gallant cavaliers and excellent dames have long since "gone to supper " with Polonius in the play. The bright roses are withered :-the greyhounds have coursed their last hare, and been in turn run down by a brace more fleet: the lapdogs no more snarl and sleep away their idle aristocratic days, gone long ago to sleep on colder and harder beds than ladies' laps. The rich laces have regaled some royal family of dainty moths-gone in their turn, and forgotten even by the annalists of Mothland :-the books the fair hand held, in which the words all ended with an e, are now unopened, being far from easy to perusethe hunting bugles no longer echo through the hills, chronicling the death of Reynard, their gay music is no more, and like those "horns of Elfland faintly blowing," dies away in the far distance of the Past. All are gone; and in their turn too, the stalwart soldiers, and fine courtly gentlemen -men who looked around upon their broad possessions, and thought the sun would shine for them always, not push them soon into night, to make room for those other actors waiting for their time to make an entrance on the stage of life. They are all crumbled along with their 'nobleness and meanness-their thousand conspicuous faults and bright virtues. They empty no more goblets: hunt no more: league no more against royal oppression, or the encroachment of the peasant galling the courtier's heel. They are all gone long ago, like the days they filled with their gay revels and great deeds.

Let us endeavor to return for a moment to the times they moved in, and, if possible, look upon the old race in their homes. To accomplish any thing like a complete picture of their manners, would require, of course, much space-far more than we have on the present occasion; but we may find something to interest us, even in a hasty glance at a single period. Let us select the commencement of the Eighteenth Century, before there were any cities in Virginia, and when the royal Governors, like moons shining with borrowed light, held their miniature viceregal courts in Williamsburg or as they called it then, Middle Plantation. The wealthy Virginian did not live at Middle

Plantation-having an unconquerable aversion to assemblages of houses. He resided in baronial splendor on his large estate, surrounded by a small army of "followers"-in other words, of black and white indented servants. He went to Middle Plantation on all occasions of ceremony, and, of course, resided temporarily there, when he chanced to be a member of the House of Burgesses, but he was by no means fond of the place. He was much more at home on his plantation, and we will go to find him in his comfortable home.

He sits there, in the long portico whose trellis is covered all over with bright flowering vines-a tall, fine-looking cavalier, with open honest features and a pleasant smile. He is clad in rich cloth and velvet, with silk stockings, ruffles at wrist and breast, and his long waistcoat, fitting easily over his portly figure, reaches to the knees; it is of exactly the same length with his square-cut coat, and of the same material, but ornamented with figures worked with silver thread. The hair is brushed back from the forehead, covered with powder, and tied behind with plain black ribbon. On days of ceremony he wears a handsome, but strong and serviceable sword, suspended from a broad belt, buckled over the coat and falling down very low on the left side. When he visits Middle Plantation he wears fine shoes of Spanish leather, ornamented with diamond buckles; those which he goes about his plantation in are much stronger and plainer. Thus dressed, with his courtly smile, pleasant openness of face, and good-humored air of self-importance, engendered by long sway upon his large estate, he is as elegant an old cavalier as could be well imagined. Place him surrounded by his family in the wide, oakwainscoted dining-room of his mansion, with a volume of the new serial of Mr. Joseph Addison in his hand, and we have a tolerable idea of the external appearance of the worthy gentleman, at home on his plantation, or at Williamsburg.-Let us now, after speaking of his costume, spend a few words on his character. The "Old Virginia gentlemen," as they are now often called, were a race of men with probably more good and bad qualities, and with those good and bad qualities in greater excess, than any other class of human beings that ever lived. They were brave, true, honest, and open-heartedbetter men in every way than their English prototypes. The "gentlemen of England-the untitled nobility, as some one calls them-were men of great cour

age and extreme ambition, if we could get at the truth of the matter, in all times and places ;-but with this courage, they possessed vices and meannesses which make the reader of the present day hesitate whether to admire, pity, or despise them. The Virginian was improved by his distance from the vices and temptations of a corrupt and dissolute court: in Virginia there were no lords to bend to, no rapacious ministries led on by scheming Bolingbrokes to flatter or be ruined by. There were no palaces which made him ashamed of his comfortable manor-house; no maids of honor, fair and frail, to make his daughters blush for their country manners and fashions, or corrupt their pure morals; no elegant, perfumed, fine gentlemen to lead his sons into wild revels and contaminating purlieus, or to gambling-houses, there to fleece them after the fashion very much in vogue with "roystering blades" and "jolly Mohocks." His wife was not subjected to the insulting admiration and insidious compliments of some notorious rake-admiration just of that description, and carried just so far, that the indignant husband must feign not to see it, and smile, and be the excellent good friend of his insulting guest, on pain of being subjected to that most dreadful of ordeals, ridicule. His daughters could grow up with unblemished reputations, as well as pure hearts, safe from the shameless hints and inuendoes, then fashionable talk with ladies in their morning calls-safe, more than all, from the trained skill and diabolical cunning of those men whose enormities the comedy of the time could not caricature: every thing was purer far off, here, in Virginia. The inane jests and laughter of a social organization which tried thus to conceal its unbelief in man or woman, or in God-to drown the stings of conscience in wine and revel-were not heard across the wide Atlantic: the atmosphere laden with the odor of a corrupt, festering court, vainly endeavoring to smother its rank effluvia in perfume, did not extend as far as the fresh "Virgin Land." And so, with all around him purer and fresher, like the bright morning which blessed him, the Old Virginia gentleman became himself much more pure. He was a simple, worthy man in heartwith chivalry for ladies and honesty for all men with whom he dealt. His door was never closed, and the broad board was spread for every comer throughout the year. No beggar ever went away hungry from his door, or asked in vain for a night's lodging in winter. That is the plain, unvarnished picture; we can

only lament the shadows which deformed it.

There were dark colors in the picture, which I, for one, will not suppress. The Virginia gentleman; so honest, hospitable, generous, and estimable, was, with all this, intensely aristocratic in the very worst acceptation of the word. Not aristocratic in the sense which should attach to the term truly-a sense in which every one should regard it, which should make us cling to the doctrine of aristocracypower to the Best-as the greatest hope and stay of nations: the Virginia gentleman did not so translate it. With him the aptoro were the gentlemen by birth, the hereditary landed proprietors, the men whose forefathers were "gentlemen" before them-who could bow elegantly over a lady's hand, and tread a minuet gracefully. I know that in the characters of this old race of men were to be found a thousand conspicuous virtues and bright graces, making them, as far as these things went, undeniably the "foremost men of all the world:" I have no desire to question the existence of those virtues, for many reasons. They did possess them; I know it, I do not deny it. They are justly entitled to the praise of having been a courageous and honest race of men-as true, and honest, and courageous as the world has ever seen, when duty called on them. But, what was wicked, what was shameful, what was unchristian, here as elsewhere, was that contempt they felt toward every man who chanced not to be born a "gentleman." It was wicked and shameful, because it mortified and humbled noble natures sprung from low estate-a thousand times unchristian, because opposed directly in the very teeth to what onr Saviour taught men in his life and words. Nothing excuses it; scarcely any thing palliates it. It was not concealed, or pretended to be denied. It was a contempt and disregard, as genuine in its character and excessive in degree as any other trait of the "cocked-hat gentry." It was indiscrimináte in its exercise-no exception was permitted to assert itself, and no genius, no nobility or elevated purity could cause the taint to be lost sight of for a moment. A man of the people might distinguish himself never so much, but the invisible barrier between himself and the "gentry" defied his utmost efforts to remove it. This cannot be denied, and will not be; because in our vastly liberalized day and generation much of the same prejudice exists among many of the best men, not only in Virginia, but throughout the Union. It was no less

true of them than contracted and unmanly. That was the feeling of the whole race, the dark shade in the picture; the shadow which history, when she begins to speak, not stammer, will vainly endeavor to remove.

noon.

But to leave this part of the subject and pass on. The daily habits of the old Virginia gentleman are not without interest, and suggestiveness. The stout planter rose with the sun, made a hearty ploughmanlike breakfast, surrounded by his brightfaced wife and children, then mounting his easy-going cob, made the tour of his plantation, seeing that the little army of white and black laborers were at their work in the wheat, corn, or tobacco field. He gave his orders to the overseer, saw to his stock, caressed the glossy necks of his hunters and racehorses who whinnied at the sound of his well-known voice, and then with a healthy color reddening his open face. rode once again into the field, and so came home to dinner. The wits and beauties of England had lately introduced the fashion of going to dinner at the late hour of two or three o'clock: but Virginia was not quick to follow every caprice, and "new fangled notion" of the Mother Country. The old Virginian dined still, as his fathers had done before him, at the honest hour of And plainly too:-we very much fear that the "silver and gold plate" which so figure in rhetorical diatribes against the class were more imaginary than real. True, the tea-service was of silver, and more valuable for the workmanship than the material, like Cellini's chisellings today but plain, trenchers, and steel forks were used at dinner. After the hearty meal the old gentleman betook himself to the Library, or hall or portico, and whiled away an hour or two with the assistance of his pipe over some three-months-old journal from England which told him what was, or had been, going on in Parliament or in reading his news letter from Williamsburg alias Middle Plantation, swearing audibly the while at some proclamation of "His Excellency;"-or else some old neighbor came in and they talked together of plantation inatters, and the blood of horses, and breeds of sheep and cattle: the conversation ending usually in a visit to the stable, and a critical examination of the limbs and movements of the slim-legg'd race-horses, led out by a rising generation of small, monkey-like black grooms. At sunset or soon after came supper, and quiet social enjoyment by the cheerful fire of winter or the open window in the summer time: and games

of ombre or tictac, and music on the harpsichord-and then with devotion from the "Book of Common Prayer" the household separated for their chambers. The "Squire" as he was often called varied this routine by occasionally spending an hour in reading Shakspeare, or Horace in hand, endeavoring to give the Oxford sound to the ringing odes: or he attended races; or followed the fox-hounds, drinking in with much delight their musical cry; or presided at the county courts, and visited with great complacency the utmost penalties of the law on trespassers, and other invaders of the sacred right of property. On Sunday he rolled grandly to church in his fine chariot with its four glossy, long-tailed horses: and devoutly made the responses: and after service talking with the fox-hunting, card-playing parson of the parish-fulminated terrible menaces against those audacious "New Lights" who presumed to dissent from the doctrines or regulations of the great Established Church of England. Thus the old Virginia gentleman passed his time at peace with all men for the most part, and in his own estimation as worthy in the sight of God as fallen man can be in this world. Let us not discuss the question: the lights and shadows, the strength and weakness of the individual are all manifest.

The eldest son of the worthy now claims our attention. That young gentleman was not accustomed, formerly during his lifetime, to neglect; and would, if that were possible, resent any disregard of his claims to notice, any silence on the subject of his manifold graces and attractions. He is quite a different person from his father: there is no sturdiness in his form or air, no healthy ruddy color in his cheeks at least natural color, of which we shall come to say a few words presently. He cordially disdains plantation affairs, and considers conversation, generally speaking, horribly wearisome. He has just returned from Oxford and a season in London, where he made the acquaintance of all the more celebrated bucks, and even himself achieved no slight success "in the nice conduct of a clouded cane." Master Hopeful has a languid manner, and patronizes with an air of good-humored superiority his younger brothers and sisters. Why, indeed, should he work or worry himself about his future? The estate comes naturally to him, as he is the eldest son. He is the heir nearest the throne, the succession is his own beyond cavil or dispute-and so he looks down kindly on the household and practises the