Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, was first settled by the nobility and gentry of France. They were men in position among the first of that great and glorious people. Animated with the ambition for high enterprise, they came in sufficient numbers to create a society, and to plant French manners and customs, and the elegance of French learning and French society, upon the banks of the Mississippi. The commercial and social intermingling of these people resulted in intermarriages, which very soon assimilated them in most things as one people, at least in feeling, sentiment and interest. From such a stock grew the people inhabiting the banks of the Mississippi, from Vicksburg to New Orleans. In 1826, young men of talent and enterprise had come from Europe, and every section of the United States, and, giving their talents to the development of the country, had created a wealth, greater and more generally diffused than was, at that time, to be found in any other planting or farming community in the United States. Living almost exclusively among themselves, their manners and feelings were homogeneous; and living, too, almost entirely upon the products of their plantations, independent of their market-crops, they grew rich so rapidly as to mock the fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes, was sublimely grand, and seemed to inspire ideas and aspirations commensurate with its own majesty in the people upon its borders. In no country are to be found women of more refined character, more beauty, or more elegance of manners, than among the planters' wives and daughters of the Mississippi coast. Reared in the country, and accustomed to exercise in the open air, in walking through the shady avenues of the extensive and beautifully ornamented grounds about the home or plantation-house; riding on horseback along the river's margin, elevated upon the levee, covered with the green Bermuda grass, smoothly spreading over all the ground, save the pretty open road, stretching through this grass, like a thread of silver in a a cloth of green; with the great drab river, moving in silent majesty, on one side, and the extended fields of the plantation, teeming with the crop of cane or cotton, upon the other. Their exercise, thus surrounded, becomes a school, and their ideas expand and grow with the sublimity of their surroundings. The health-giving exercise and the wonderful scene yields vigor both to mind and body. Nor is this scene, or its effects, greater in the development of mind and body than that of the hill-country of the river-counties of Mississippi.