Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/318

Rh them to be disturbed, and every morning, after breakfast, come little grey sparrows and the brilliant cardinal-birds (so called from the splendour of their plumage) quite familiarly, and pick up the rice-grains which she scatters for them in the piazza before the door. On the quiet little river Pee Dee, glides first one and then another canoe paddled by negroes, and it is only by the steamboats which now and then swing their tails of smoke over the river Wackamow, beyond Pee Dee, and by the sailing vessels which one sees on their way down to Cuba or China, that one observes that here also one lives in this trading and trafficking world.

Mr. Poinsett is a French gentilhomme in his whole exterior and demeanour (he is of a Erench family), and unites the refinement and natural courtesy of the Frenchman with the truthful simplicity and straightforwardness which I so much like in the true American, the man of the New World. That fine figure is still slender and agile, although he suffers from asthma. He has seen much, and been among much, and is an extremely agreeable person to converse with, in particular as relates to the internal political relationship of the United States, which he has assisted in forming, and the spirit and intention of which he thoroughly understands, whilst he has a warm compatriot heart. I have, in a couple of conversations with him in the evening after tea, learned more of these relationships, and those of the individual states to their common government, than I could have learned from books, because I acquire this knowledge in a living manner from the sagacious old statesman; I can ask questions, make objections, and have them at once replied to. He is the first man that I have met with in the South, with one exception, who speaks of slavery in a really candid and impartial spirit. He earnestly desires that his native land should free itself from this moral obliquity, and he has faith in its doing so; but he sees the whole