Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/251

Rh flock to this region. Half the population of the larger cities consists of Germans; they have their concerts, their shooting-grounds, their dances, and they drink beer as in the old world, whilst they participate in the legislative and commercial life of the new.

Lower down, in Kentucky and Missouri, commences the region of cotton. There cotton plantations and slave-villages are to be seen. To this succeeds the region of the sugar-cane, with warm summer winds and the sun in the middle of winter, beautiful plantations, and groves of orange and magnolia trees. Here is Louisiana, the most southern of the Mississippi States.

Here we meet with the French and Spaniards, as well as people from all the countries of the world, all submitting to the laws and government of the Anglo-American.

These southern States present, in their institution and scenery, a peculiar feature in the life of the United States. The traveller in these southern States is not edified; no ideal of social life elevates here his mind and his glance: no public endeavour is made here, as in the individual and governmental life of the Free States. But he is amused by the many novel and unusual objects which present themselves to his gaze; he meets many unusually cultivated and agreeable people, shining out like diamonds in the sand. A new world of nature full of treasures is opened to him—the enchantment of the peculiar scenery of the south, the delicious character of the atmosphere during the greater part of the year, the primeval forests along the banks of the Red rivers, with their thousand varieties of trees, flowers, and creeping vegetation; the song of the hundred-tongued bird, the nightingale of America (Turdus polyglottus), and the pleasant but monotonous whistling “Whip-poor-will;” the many glorious trees, live-oaks, with their long waving mosses, the magnolia, with its large snow-white flowers, cypresses, tulip and amber-trees, and fan-palms; the richness of