A suitor appeared for the hand of this fair and accomplished girl.  It was Joseph Alston of South Carolina, a gentleman of twenty-two, possessor of large estates in rice plantations and slaves, and a man of much spirit and talent.  He valued his estates at two hundred thousand pounds sterling.  Their courtship was not a long one; for though she, as became her sex, checked the impetuosity of his advances and argued for delay, she was easily convinced by the reasons which he adduced for haste.  She reminded him that Aristotle was of opinion that a man should not marry till he was thirty-six.  “A fig for Aristotle,” he replied; “let us regard the ipse dixit of no man.  It is only want of fortune or want of discretion,” he continued, “that could justify such a postponement of married joys.  But suppose,” he added,

“(merely for instance,) a young man nearly two-and-twenty, already of the greatest discretion, with an ample fortune, were to be passionately in love with a young lady almost eighteen, equally discreet with himself, and who had a ‘sincere friendship’ for him, do you think it would be necessary to make him wait till thirty? particularly where the friends on both sides were pleased with the match.”

She told him, also, that some of her friends who had visited Charleston had described it as a city where the yellow-fever and the “yells of whipped negroes, which assail your ears from every house,” and the extreme heat, rendered life a mere purgatory.  She had heard, too, that in South Carolina the men were absorbed in hunting, gaming, and racing; while the women, robbed of their society, had no pleasures but to come together in large parties, sip tea, and look prim.  The ardent swain eloquently defended his native State:—­

“What!” he exclaimed,

“is Charleston, the most delightfully situated city in America, which, entirely open to the ocean, twice in every twenty-four hours is cooled by the refreshing sea-breeze, the Montpelier of the South, which annually affords an asylum to the planter and the West Indian from every disease, accused of heat and unhealthiness?  But this is not all, unfortunate citizens of Charleston; the scream, the yell of the miserable unresisting African, bleeding under the scourge of relentless power, affords music to your ears!  Ah! from what unfriendly cause does this arise?  Has the God of heaven, in anger, here changed the order of nature?  In every other region, without exception, in a similar degree of latitude, the same sun which ripens the tamarind and the anana, ameliorates the temper, and disposes it to gentleness and kindness.  In India and other countries, not very different in climate from the southern parts of the United States, the inhabitants are distinguished for a softness and inoffensiveness of manners, degenerating almost to effeminacy; it is here then, only, that we are exempt from the general influence of climate:  here only that,