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This will be the last letter I shall write you from
this plantation, where I have been passing a few weeks
in the most agreeable society. Our party landed here
early on the morning after leaving Baton Rouge; for
M. de Clery, the proprietor of this noble sugar estate,
is a relative of the Colonel's, and the two gentlemen are
great friends.

But before I say any thing about my present abode,
let me describe to you the scenery of the “coast” between
Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Present to your
mind's eye a moving lake of dark, oak-tinted water,
rolling onward nearly a broad mile wide, and winding
league after league through an illimitable valley, as level
as a billiard table, and as even all around the horizon as
is the edge of the sky-meeting ocean. Behold both
banks lined with wide sugar plantations extending rearward,
from a mile to a league, green with the corn-like
leaves of the young cane, and bordered in the rear by
impenetrable forests.

In the bosom of each of these estates you see a stately
villa, its chateau-like roof towering above a grove, and
surrounded by colonnades, which are hedged in by orange
and lemon trees, the rich, golden fruit hanging within

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reach of the hand from the drawing-room windows. On
one side of these chateaux, or else in the rear, glitter the
white walls of a score or two of African cottages, which
compose the village of the slaves, each with its little
garden plot, and shaded by a roof-tree. In the midst
of this neat and pretty Ethiopian village, rises a tower,
on the summit of which is swung a plantation bell, which
at day dawn rings up the slaves to commence their labor,
rings them to their meals through the day, and to their
quarters at night. Not far from this negro village,
standing massive and alone in the midst of the sugar
fields, rise the high brick walls and tall, steeple-like
chimneys of the sucrérie, or sugar-house, where the cane
is ground up, and goes through its various processes,
from gross molasses to the purest white crystalization.
Some of these sucréries are of great size, looking like
universities, or some public edifice; and they cost so much,
that, with the other expense of establishing a sugar
estate, it is common to say that a “man must be a rich
cotton planter before he can commence as a poor sugar
planter,” the expense of starting a cotton plantation
being very small compared with that for the latter; but
the sugar planter has the advantage of striding on to
opulence in proportion to his outlay.

This description which I have given of a sugar estate,
with its vast, level fields, like emerald plains, its stately
sucrérie, its snow-white negro village, its elegant chateau
half buried in trees, will answer for that of the
hundreds that continuously line the two shores of the
Mississippi, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
The steamer, therefore, as she moves down, seems as if
passing through a majestic canal, with a street of villas

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on either shore. A few yards from the water runs a
beautiful road, level and smooth, bordered on one side
by gardens and houses, and on the other by the river.
This road is always enlivened by carriages, horsemen,
or foot-passengers; for the whole line of shore, for the
one hundred and fifty miles, is a continued unbroken
street. When our steamer ran near one shore or the
other, we could look in upon the inmates of the houses,
and see them at their meals, and as we sailed past by moonlight,
the voice of song, the thrum of the guitar, or the
soft cadence of the flute, would float off to us from the
piazzas or lawns, or some bower buried in the shadows
of the garden. The atmosphere was laden with the fragrance
of flowers, and the mocking-bird's joyous and
varied melody filled the branches, to our imagination,
with a whole aviary of singing birds. Ah, it was perfect
enchantment, Mr. —, sailing through these lovely
scenes beneath the broad shield of the moon casting its
radiance of burnished silver over all. The very river,
usually in its mildest mood champing and growling like
a chained lion, flowed almost unruffled, like a moving
glass surface, mirroring the light with dazzling brilliancy.
Below us, and above us, the red and green signal lights
of other boats, ascending and descending, added to the
changing beauty of all, while the bright flames kept
burning all night at the wood stations, along the shores,
casting their long, blood-red columns far along the surface
of the stream, added a certain wildness to the general
features of the whole.

I remained on deck to a late hour, wrapped well in
my shawl, to guard against the dews, and enjoyed the
novelty of the time and place, with emotions that were

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new and delightful. Occasionally the sombre tower of
a Roman chapel, or the gray walls of a convent, (for we
were passing through the heart of a Roman Catholic
population,) came into view. One called the Convent
of the Sacred Heart, “Le Sacre Cœur,” was one of the
most lovely objects I ever beheld, lighted up as its long
corridors were by moonlight, casting half its front alternately
into light and shade.

This, I am told, is a remarkably good school of education,
and many of the “first families” in the South have
their daughters educated there, or at the Ursuline Convent
in New Orleans—Convent des Ursulines.

There is no doubt, Mr. —, that these Roman Catholic
schools for girls are among the best we have. I
have seen, in the South, several estimable ladies who
were educated at this Convent, and certainly I never
met with more intelligent, well-informed, interesting
persons, more thoroughly accomplished ladies.

“Ah, yes,” you say objectingly, “but they are in
danger of becoming Roman Catholics.”

Of these ladies but one is a Roman Catholic, and she
is not very strongly grounded in that faith, usually
attending the Episcopal church with her husband, and
bringing up her children in this church. The danger,
if girls are well instructed first at home, is very slight
of their being won over to the Roman faith in these
schools. There is a certain romantic fascination connected
with this religion, which, for a time, has its influence
on an imaginative temperament, but it soon wears off.
I know and love an interesting lady, who, from her thirteenth
to her seventeenth year, was a pupil at the Ursuline
Convent. She came out a romantic Roman Catholic,

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but is now a communicant of the Presbyterian church.
She says she “dearly loved the kind good nuns; that
they were gentle and devoted, and she used to love to
sit up with one old nun, Ursula, at her vigils, about
Christmas times, and listen to her tales of wonderful
miracles performed by saints and the Blessed Virgin; in
all of which good dame Ursula had faith. She stoutly
and piously believed “how the Virgin once came down
and touched her cheek with her finger, and cured her
toothache; how St. Ursula, their patroness, pinched
one of the sisters on the arm for sleeping at her post,
so that the mark, in the shape of a cross, remained there
at this hour; how she had seen the blood from the hands
of the picture of Christ crucified, over the high altar
fall in great drops to the floor, and one of these drops,
which she caught on her 'kerchief, she showed me, first
crossing herself and me with the signs of the cross made
backwards and forwards! But the story that most captivated
me was how (as she was watching before the altar
one Good Friday eve) she saw the infant boy Jesus leave
the arms of his blessed mother, there in the picture, and
fly with golden wings to the great picture of Christ crucified,
on the right of the altar, and, with tears, wipe
the blood from His hands, and feet, and side, and strive
to stop its flowing, with many lamentations! All this,”
added the intelligent lady, “I firmly believed, but they
produced upon me no religious impression; I listened
to them just as I read Mrs. Radcliffe's horrible tales of
dungeons and bleeding nuns. Our education was not
committed to this good, credulous dame, do not suppose,
but there were ladies in the Convent of the most elegant
manners, of the most accurate education, and minds

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every way accomplished; ladies of rank, who had left
the brilliant society of European cities to devote themselves
to heaven. My chief teacher was Sister Therése,
who had been in France the Countess de —, and who
is said to have loved Napoleon, the King of Rome, and
at his death had retired from the world. All the nuns
were French ladies.”

When I asked this lady if she still felt attached to the
nuns, she answered, “Oh, yes; I never visit New Orleans
that I do not go and see them and they receive me in the
most affectionate manner! If I should ever meet with a
reverse of fortune, and lose my husband and child, I
should, I have no doubt, seek the calm repose and holy
shelter of that home of my childhood; for, when I left
them, the Superior said, as she wept on my shoulder,
“Daughter, if the world is adverse to thee, remember
thou hast here always a shelter from its storms.”

I am not advocating, Mr. —, the habit of educating
Protestant girls in Roman nunneries; all I can say in
their favor is, that they do bestow thorough educations
upon their pupils; and if the Roman Catholics would
only give up their wicked additions to Christianity, their
worship of Mary, their prayers to Peter and Paul, their
confessional, their idolatry of the mass, their merchandize
of sins, and their other excrescences, which they
have heaped upon the Gospel, till it is almost lost sight
of, they would be the best teachers of youth in the world.
But holding on to these errors, they will always keep at
a distance the many who would patronize them.

The Episcopalians are now taking the place once so
prominently occupied by the Roman Catholics, as teachers
of youth; and the female schools kept by Episcopal

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clergymen, are acknowledged, even by other denominations,
to be the best schools in the United States.

I forgot to say that my intelligent friend informed me,
that good old Aunt Ursula always knelt down with the
soles of her bare feet turned up to the fire, when she
said her prayers, in order that they might, while she was
praying and telling her beads, get nice and warm before
she jumped into bed. I have heard that “prayers and
provender hinder no man's journey;” but Aunt Ursula
knew that to say one's prayers, and warm one's toes the
whilst, hindered not a holy nun's devotions.

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