Before he left, he invited me to visit his plantations, giving me careful directions to find them, and saying that if he should not have returned before I reached them, his wife and his overseer would give me every attention if I would tell them he told me to visit them. He said again, and in this connection, that he believed this was the most inhospitable country in the world, and asked, "as I had been a good deal of a traveller, didn't I think so myself?" I answered that my experience was much too small to permit me to form an opinion so contrary to that generally held.
If they had a reputation for hospitality, he said, it could only be among their own sort. They made great swell-head parties; and when they were on their plantation places, they made it a point to have a great deal of company; they would not have anything to do if they didn't. But they were all swell-heads, I might be sure; they'd never ask anybody but a regular swell-head to see them.
His own family, however, seemed not to be excluded from the swell-head society.
Among numerous anecdotes illustrative of the folly of his neighbours, or his own prejudices and jealousy, I remember none which it would be proper to publish but the following:-
"Do you remember a place you passed?" [describing the locality].
"Yes," said I; "a pretty cottage with a large garden, with some statues or vases in it."
"I think it likely. Got a foreign gardener, I expect. That's all the fashion with them. A nigger isn't good enough for them. Well, that belongs to Mr. A. J. Clayborn.[?] He's got to be a very rich man. I suppose he's got as many as five hundred people on all his places. He went out to Europe a few years ago, and sometime after he came back, he came up to Natchez. I was there with my wife at the same
