Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/413

Rh now returned, after about a year's residence in Baltimore, in Maryland. It was a delight to me to see her joyful reception at home. How alike are all good homes and relationships! The same sorrows, the same joys! But that I have long known even without seeing it.

There is here this evening a great soirée for my sake. I am very glad that I am not responsible for it. I have nothing to do but to go about, tolerably elegantly attired, faire la belle conversation, reply to the questions, of “How do you like this? and how do you like that?” And be amiable according to my ability.

June 10th.—Now, my sweet child, I must prepare this letter, which is even now too long, for its departure. I have enjoyed myself for several days in doing—nothing, watching the humming-birds, fluttering about the red flowers of the garden, or looking at the great turkey buzzards, sitting on the roof and chimneys, spreading out their large wings in the wind or the sun, which gives them a very strange appearance; and for the rest looking about me a little in the State and in the city.

South Carolina is a State of much more aristocratic character, as well in law as social life, than Georgia, and has not the element of freedom and humanity, as the fundamental principle of its life, like its younger sister State. Massachusetts and Virginia, the old dominions, the two oldest mother hives, from which swarms went forth to all the other States of the Union, sent also its earliest cultivators to South Carolina. Puritans and Cavaliers were united, but that merely through pecuniary interests. The Englishmen, Lord Shaftesbury, and John Locke, established here an aristocratic community, and negro slaves were declared to be the absolute property of their masters. Nevertheless, South Carolina lacks not in her earliest history the moment which made her a member of the new world, and which, according to my view, was when she offered a sanctuary and a new home to the