Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/73

50 and New Orleans. Great beauties, like Sallie Ward and Diana Bullitt, would be famously dressed, but they were the exceptions. Being a Northerner, an abolitionist, and a Whig, it was certain that my dearest friends should be Southern girls and Democrats. We never talked politics, but wondered that we liked each other so much. I adored them — these beautiful women with soft voices and gentle eyes who had been brought up so differently from what I had been. They were accustomed to be waited on; had had a dozen slaves about them all their lives, while I had been taught in cold New England to wait on myself. But we met on the common ground of youth and love of pleasure. I used to admire their pretty Southern accent and try to imitate it. They did not so much admire mine, and told me I spoke too fiercely. We differed, too, on the subject of engagements.

"Why, Miss Wilson," said one of these dear sirens, "I'd just as lief be engaged to five men at once, and then I'd pick out the best man at last and just marry him."

I gave her, I dare say, a Puritan lecture on constancy, at which she laughed. Oh, such a musical laugh! Her brother was one of my beaux, and she said to me: "Now, Miss Wilson, you needn't marry Preston, because you're a wicked abolitionist; but you just get engaged to him and come down to Georgia and pay us a visit."

It was through the friendship of one of these dear Southern friends that I was smuggled in to a dinner at Mrs. Polk's, just before she left the White House. I remember how very long it seemed and how dreary — state dinners at sixteen are dreary. The dinner was a very elegant one, and I can now see Mrs. Ashley's plumes across the table. Mrs. Ashley was a very handsome