Books of travel in the United States generally contain some remarks on the personal attractions of the mixed race in New Orleans. From the little I saw of them, I can add that they appeared to me as _spirituel_ as the French themselves. I am more disposed to believe that this is hereditary, than that it is the result merely of imitation. But with respect to their personal appearance, after having of late seen so many of the coarse and ill-visaged half-breeds in which an Anglo-Saxon was the father, I was much struck with their superiority in face and figure. The features of many might almost have been called delicate and refined; and it was so, strange to say, even when very perceptible traces of the African nose and lips remained, and these still surmounted with the African wool. I understood that this was also to a great extent the case where a Spaniard was the father. The reason of this difference I believe to be a very obvious one, that Frenchmen and Spaniards, having much smaller bones than the Northern nations, are better able on that account to correct, in their mixed descendants, the grossness of the physiognomy and figure of the African. The German half-breeds are still more unattractive than the Anglo-Saxon; the Scandinavian are worse; but the worst of all are those whose long-headed and high cheek-boned fathers come from the north of the Tweed. [Sidenote: _The Best Road in the World._] No one without having seen the thing himself—and the jolting will impress it on his memory—can form any proper conception of the holes, the mud, and the pools of water which not unfrequently constitute what is called in America a road. At Augusta I had seen axles disappear in the main streets. But the most advanced specimen of this kind of means of communication I ever passed over, was in going to the station of the Mississippi and Tennessee railway at New Orleans. I could not see or hear that any attempt had ever been made to form a road. The traffic was great, and was of course confined by the houses to a narrow street. It was a natural swamp, and there had been lately a great deal of rain. My reflections on coming at last to the station were, that American horses were wonderful animals, and that in nothing did the Americans themselves show their inventive powers so triumphantly as in constructing carriages which could carry heavy loads day after day through such difficulties;—I do not say through such roads, because there was nothing but a collection of the hindrances to travelling which a road is made to remedy.