Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/319

Rh thing at present involved in so many ways, and the difficulties attending any change so great, that he leaves the question to be solved by the future. He firmly believes in the onward progress of America, but he is far from satisfied with many things in the country, and especially in this very State. He is one of the New World's wise men, who more and more withdraw themselves from the world, looking calmly on from his Hermitage, and apparently happy there with his excellent wife and his rural occupation.

In the morning, after I have eaten, with a good relish, my breakfast of rice and egg and cocoa, I help Mrs. Poinsett to feed the birds, and am delighted that the beautiful showy cardinal-birds will condescend to pick up my rice-grains. And then, if I rush out into the garden ready to embrace the air, and the shrubs, and all nature, the good old lady laughs at me right heartily. Then out comes Mr. Poinsett, begs me to notice the beautiful la marque rose, which Mr. Downing gave him, and which now is full of large clusters of yellowish-white flowers on the trellised walls of the house; and thence he takes me round the garden, and tells me the names of the plants which I do not know, and their peculiarities, for the old gentleman is a skilful botanist. He has also taken me round his rice-grounds, which are now being sown, after which they will lie under water. And it is this irrigation, and the exhalation therefrom, which makes the rice-plantations so unwholesome for the white population during the hot season. Mr. Poinsett's plantations are not large, and seem not to have more than sixty negroes upon them. Several other plantations adjoin these, but neither are they large, as it appeared, and my entertainers seemed not to be intimate with their proprietors.

I range about in the neighbourhood, through the rice-fields and negro-villages, which amuses me greatly. The slave-villages consist of small, white-washed, wooden