[Footnote 16:  Fithian Journal and Letters, p. 296.]

Van Buren found the towns in the Yazoo Valley so small as barely to be entitled to places on the map; he found the planters’ houses to be commonly mere log structures, as the farmers’ houses about his own home in Michigan had been twenty years before; and he found the roads so bad that the mule teams could hardly draw their wagons nor the spans of horses their chariots except in dry weather.  But when on his horseback errands in search of a position he learned to halloo from the roadway and was regularly met at each gate with an extended hand and a friendly “How do you do, sir?  Won’t you alight, come in, take a seat and sit awhile?”; when he was invariably made a member of any circle gathered on the porch and refreshed with cool water from the cocoanut dipper or with any other beverages in circulation; when he was asked as a matter of course to share any meal in prospect and to spend the night or day, he discovered charms even in the crudities of the pegs for hanging saddles on the porch and the crevices between the logs of the wall for the keeping of pipes and tobacco, books and newspapers.  Finally, when the planter whose house he had made headquarters for two months declined to accept a penny in payment, Van Buren’s heart overflowed.  The boys whom he then began to teach he found particularly apt in historical studies, and their parents with whom he dwelt were thorough gentlefolk.

Toward the end of his narrative, Van Buren expressed the thought that Mississippi, the newly settled home of people from all the older Southern states, exemplified the manners of all.  He was therefore prompted to generalize and interpret:  “A Southern gentleman is composed of the same material that a Northern gentleman is, only it is tempered by a Southern clime and mode of life.  And if in this temperament there is a little more urbanity and chivalry, a little more politeness and devotion to the ladies, a little more suaviter in modo, why it is theirs—­be fair and acknowledge it, and let them have it.  He is from the mode of life he lives, especially at home, more or less a cavalier; he invariably goes a-horseback.  His boot is always spurred, and his hand ensigned with the riding-whip.  Aside from this he is known by his bearing—­his frankness and firmness.”  Furthermore he is a man of eminent leisureliness, which Van Buren accounts for as follows:  “Nature is unloosed of her stays there; she is not crowded for time; the word haste is not in her vocabulary.  In none of the seasons is she stinted to so short a space to perform her work as at the North.  She has leisure enough to bud and blossom—­to produce and mature fruit, and do all her work.  While on the other hand in the North right the reverse is true.  Portions are taken off the fall and spring to lengthen out the winter, making his reign nearly half the year.  This crowds the work of the whole year, you might say, into about half of it.  This ... makes the essential difference between a Northerner and a Southerner.  They are children of their respective climes; and this is why Southrons are so indifferent about time; they have three months more of it in a year than we have.” [17]