"Swallow Barn exhibits a picture of country life in Virginia, as it existed in the first quarter of the present century. Between that period and the present day, time and what is called "the progress," have made many innovations there, as they have done every where else. The Old Dominion is losing somewhat of the raciness of her once peculiar, and--speaking in reference to the locality described in these volumes--insulated cast of manners. The mellow, bland, and sunny luxuriance of her home society--its good fellowship, its hearty and constitutional _companionableness_, the thriftless gayety of the people, their dogged but amiable invincibility of opinion, and that overflowing hospitality which knew no ebb--these traits, though far from being impaired, are modified at the present day by circumstances which have been gradually attaining a marked influence over social life as well as political relation. An observer cannot fail to note that the manners of our country have been tending towards a uniformity which is visibly effacing all local differences. The old states, especially, are losing their original distinctive habits and modes of life, and in the same degree, I fear, are losing their exclusive American character. A traveller may detect but few sectional or provincial varieties in the general observances and customs of society, in comparison with what were observable in the past generations, and the pride, or rather the vanity, of the present day is leading us into a very notable assimilation with foreign usages. The country now apes the city in what is supposed to be the elegancies of life, and the city is inclined to value and adopt the fashions it is able to import across the Atlantic, and thus the whole surface of society is exhibiting the traces of a process by which it is likely to be rubbed down, in time, to one level, and varnished with the same gloss. It may thus finally arrive at a comfortable insipidity of character which may not be willingly reckoned as altogether a due compensation for the loss of that rough but pleasant flavor which belonged to it in its earlier era. There is much good sense in that opinion which ascribes a wholesome influence to those homebred customs, which are said to strengthen local attachments and expand them into love of country. What belonged to us as characteristically American, seems already to be dissolving into a mixture which affects us unpleasantly as a plain and cosmopolitan substitute for the old warmth and salient vivacity of our ancestors. We no longer present in our pictures of domestic life so much as an earnest lover of our nationality might desire of what abroad is called the "red bird's wing"--something which belongs to us and to no one else.