In my Alice, then, I have endeavored to place before you and future generations a type taken bodily from the joyous, careless life of ante-bellum days. Many of my contemporaries will recognize her and her merry-glancing hazel eyes. My friends—all Richmond, all Virginia, in fact—will know the original of the picture,—each one his own original. But the truth is, in painting the portrait of our jolly little Alice I have aimed at more than representing the features of a charming girl. I have striven to place before you a marked phase of Virginia society,—its freedom. It was this which gave it a charm all its own, and it would be interesting, did it not lead me too far from the path of my narrative, to point out the contrasts it affords to English society. Both eminently aristocratic, it is singular that the former should have been so unshackled, so unconventional, so free, while its prototype is, without doubt, the most uncomfortable, the most stifling tyranny that men and women—and men and women, too, of one of the grandest races of all time—ever voluntarily submitted to. And, strangely enough, Virginia is almost the only one of the United States where anything like a fair type of the mother society has survived. The English gentleman, like the Virginian, has his home in the country; but this is true, in this country it may almost be said, of Virginia gentlemen alone; if, at least, the terms be not understood in a sense too literally geographical. The Southern planter was wont to betake himself to New Orleans in winter, with half his cotton crop in his pocket, reserving the other half for Saratoga and the North when summer came. Charleston was the Mecca of the South Carolinian; while the wealthy citizen of New York, if he had his villa on the Hudson, retired to it rather to avoid than to seek society, or else, still unsated with the joys of city life (the detestation of your true John Bull), even when driven out of town by the dust of summer and the glare of wall and of pavement, he hastens to Newport, there to swelter through the dog-days in all the pomp of full dress and fashionable fooleries. Some stray lord has mentioned in his hearing—or some one who has seen a stray lord—that summer is the London season (none other being possible in that climate), and straight-way he trims his whiskers _à la_ mutton-chop and buys a book of the peerage; nor suspects that the more closely you imitate an Englishman the less you resemble him,—one of the strongest characteristics of that great race being their disdainful refusal to imitate any other. CHAPTER XXXIV.