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.
These hills are peculiar. They are drift, thrown upon the primitive
formation by some natural convulsion, and usually extend some twelve or
fifteen miles into the interior.
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