antage. With the climate and soil in their
favor, they paid little attention to the cheaper luxuries of rational
living, but surrounded themselves with much that was expensive, though
utterly useless. On plantations where the owners resided, a visiter
would find the women adorned with diamonds and laces that cost
many thousand dollars, and feast his eyes upon parlor furniture and
ornaments of the most elaborate character. But the dinner-table would
present a repast far below that of a New England farmer or mechanic
in ordinary circumstances, and the sleeping-rooms would give evidence
that genuine comfort was a secondary consideration. Outside of New
Orleans and Charleston, where they are conducted by foreigners, the
South has no such market gardens, or such abundance and variety of
wholesome fruits and vegetables, as the more sterile North can boast
of everywhere. So of a thousand other marks of advancing civilization.

Virginia, "the mother of Presidents," is rich in minerals of the more
useful sort, and some of the precious metals. Her list of mineral
treasures includes gold, copper, iron, lead, plumbago, coal, and salt.
The gold mines are not available except to capitalists, and it is not
yet fully settled whether the yield is sufficient to warrant large
investments. The gold is extracted from an auriferous region,
extending from the Rappahannock to the Coosa River, in Alabama.
The coal-beds in the State are easy of access, and said to be
inexhaustible. The Kanawha salt-works are well known, and the
petroleum regions of West Virginia are attracting much attention.

Virginia presents many varieties of soil, and, with a better system of
cultivation, her productions can be greatly increased. (The same
may be said of all the Southern States, from the Atlantic to the Rio
Grande.) Her soil is favorable to all the products of the Northern
States. The wheat and corn of Virginia have a high reputation. In the
culture of tobacco she has always surpassed every other State of
the Union, and was also the first State in which it was practiced
by civilized man to any extent. Washington pronounced the central
counties of Virginia the finest agricultural district in the United
States, as he knew them. Daniel Webster declared, in a public speech
in the Shenandoah Valley, that he had seen no finer farming land in
his European travel than in that valley.

Until 1860, the people of Virginia paid considerable attention to the
raising o