“I am a beggar, and cannot consent, in this character, to be made more conspicuous, by being made a beggarly senator.  I cannot take a house in Washington, furnish it, and live in it as a gentleman.  I could not, in any other manner, entertain my people visiting Washington, consistently with my ideas of what a senator should do.  I cannot go to Washington, and, as one of them, stand among the great men of the Senate, in that magnificent hall, and feel my soul swell to theirs and its proportions, and then dodge you, or any other gentleman from Louisiana, and sneak home to a garret.  My means would allow me no better apartment.  I could not live in the mean seclusion of a miserable penury, nor otherwise than in a style comporting, in my estimation, with the dignity and the duty of a senator from Louisiana, as some have done, who were able to live and entertain as gentlemen, for the purpose of the degraded saving of half my per diem to swell my coffers at home.

“Now, my friend, I feel how miserably foolish I have been all my life.  I have thrown away fortune because I despised it.  It was too grovelling a pursuit, too mean a vocation, to make and to hoard money.  In my soul I despised it, and now you see it is revenged; for without it, I have learned, there is no gratification for ambition—­no independence of a sneering, envious world.  A bankrupt is a felon, though his mind, his virtues, and his attainments may be those of a god.  He is a useless waif upon the world; for all he has, or all he may be, is, to himself and the world, unavailable without money.  I have discarded all my ambitious aspirations long since, and tried to reconcile myself to the fact that my life has been and is a failure.  And I am sorry you have come to me to remind me that the aim of my young life was within my reach, when I have no means to grasp it, and, now that I am miserable, to show me what I might have been.  No, my friend, I must go on with the drudgery of the law, to earn my bread, and thus eke out a miserable future.  I am grateful to you and my other friends, who have delegated you to this mission.  Say so to them, if you please.  I must go to court.  The horse of the bark-mill must go to his daily circle.  Good morning!”

Some years after the event above mentioned, Grymes, as the attorney of the city of New Orleans, succeeded, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in making good the title to the batture property in the city.  What is termed batture in Louisiana is the land made by accretion or deposits of the Mississippi.  One strange feature of this great river is, that it never gets any wider.  It is continually wearing and caving on one side or the other, and making a corresponding deposit on the other bank.  Opposite a portion of the city of New Orleans this deposit has been going on for many years, while the opposite bank has been wearing away.  There are living citizens who saw in youth the river occupying what is now covered by many streets and many blocks of buildings, and is one of the most valuable portions of the city.  In truth, what was a century ago entire river, is now one-fourth of the city, and this deposit goes on annually without any decrease in its ratio.