Though I commenced my labors in the South as a general agent and superintendent of the colporteur operations of the American Tract Society in 1843--ten years before my first visit to the Southwest--though I became acquainted with its _home-life_, as that life could only be learned, by such extended horseback travels, and such religious labors, prosecuted with all the energy and all the enthusiasm of early vigorous manhood, I shall devote this volume to descriptions of _home-life_ in the Southwest. My reasons for this will be obvious and approved at a glance. Very little that would be new can now be written of the old-time home-life in the South. The fascinating and beautiful descriptions of Southern social life given us in the letters of Hon. William Wirt, the distinguished Attorney-General of the United States, in his "British Spy"; the full and minute biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and others, so exhaustive of every feature of this life; with the matchless descriptions of the inimitable Thackeray, and other later writers, leave very little to be said in illustration of this theme. But the true, the real old-time social, political, and religious home-life of the people of the Southwest is almost unknown to the great mass of the American people. Comparatively little has been written which is the result of extended personal contact with, and intimate personal knowledge of, the people. They have been largely the subjects of exaggeration and caricature. In this field I have garnered many rich and golden sheaves, where no other reaper had ever thrust in the sickle. Here I have drawn word-pictures of many scenes in the social life of a generation, and a state of civilization, rapidly passing away, never to reappear, that otherwise would have had no memorial only as perpetuated in the traditions of the people. I will only add that I am indebted to no library, to no book, not even to a newspaper, for a single fact presented in this volume. They were all gathered incidentally while laboriously engaged in the duties of my profession, as a general agent of the American Bible Society, and while traveling for years in the interests of the college over which I was called to preside. They all relate to the _ante-bellum_ period in the history of our country. CHAPTER II. MY OUTFIT FOR MY LIFE IN THE BRUSH.