were to be passionately in love with a young lady almost
eighteen, equally discreet with himself, and who had a
'sincere friendship' for him, do you think it would be
necessary to make him wait till thirty? particularly where
the friends on both sides were pleased with the match."

She told him, also, that some of her friends who had visited
Charleston had described it as a city where the yellow-fever and the
"yells of whipped negroes, which assail your ears from every house,"
and the extreme heat, rendered life a mere purgatory. She had heard,
too, that in South Carolina the men were absorbed in hunting, gaming,
and racing; while the women, robbed of their society, had no pleasures
but to come together in large parties, sip tea, and look prim. The
ardent swain eloquently defended his native State:--

"What!" he exclaimed,

"is Charleston, the most delightfully situated city in
America, which, entirely open to the ocean, twice in every
twenty-four hours is cooled by the refreshing sea-breeze,
the Montpelier of the South, which annually affords an
asylum to the planter and the West Indian from every
disease, accused of heat and unhealthiness? But this is not
all, unfortunate citizens of Charleston; the scream, the
yell of the miserable unresisting African, bleeding under
the scourge of relentless power, affords music to your ears!
Ah! from what unfriendly cause does this arise? Has the God
of heaven, in anger, here changed the order of nature? In
every other region, without exception, in a similar degree
of latitude, the same sun which ripens the tamarind and the
anana, ameliorates the temper, and disposes it to gentleness
and kindness. In India and other countries, not very
different in climate from the southern parts of the United
States, the inhabitants are distinguished for a softness and
inoffensiveness of manners, degenerating almost to
effeminacy; it is here then, only, that we are exempt from
the general influence of climate: here only that, in spite
of it, we are cruel and ferocious! Poor Carolina!"

And with regard to the manners of the Carolinians he assured the young
lady that if there was one State in the Union which could justly claim
superiority to the rest, in social refinement and the art of elegant
living, it was South Carolina, where the division of the people into
the ver