When I look back over the days of my youth, I find few greener spots than the long winter evenings spent at the Maples. It was a huge, shambling, unfinished house, open to all comers, with fires worthy of a Saxon castle, and tables groaning with Homeric joints. These were not—alas! for Gideon Stowe—the times of “thin potations.” When the ladies had retired, and the host called for hot-water and the “materials,” his tongue was loosed, and he gloried in—what were to him—the “noctes, cænaeque deorum.”
The short, broken, insufficient visits of a city, and the thronged assemblies of fashion, afford no specimens of, what used to be called in the period of Burney and Garrick, conversation. This must be sought where journals are rare, where hospitality is primitive, and where friends—who know one another—prize the continuous flow, and take time for it.
If I may venture a judgment, where there is room for bias and prepossession, I will declare my belief that these conditions no where meet in more perfection than among the educated proprietors of the South. Animated dialogue, from the necessity of the case, takes the place of purchased evening amusements. Wit and beauty are not confined to the sons and daughters of New England; nor will we readily yield to them in that glow, frankness and impulsion, which give electric force to countenance, voice, and gesture. Many a soirée have we kept up till the small hours, when a dozen horses were in the stables, and a tribe of swarthy retainers were making the joists ring in the neighboring dependencies. Here it was that in my heyday I forgot all the grammarians, from Priscian to Adam, all the classics, and all the marvels of the old world; but I was learning much of mankind in its best aspect, and not a little of myself.
Mme. Anne Stowe has been dead twenty years, and three of her sons have families near me. Her husband was a wealthy planter; but before he gained her hand she gave more than one refusal to an aspiring young fellow whose name I am not free to mention.
LIFE’S BATTLE MARCH.
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BY MRS. J. H. THOMAS, (L. L. M.)
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A mighty throng are they who gird