And your Southern grandees, before the war, were not compelled to drudge for a subsistence; they had to take little thought for the morrow.

Their vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous slave-driver the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun, and the land, nature's own flower garden and man's inalienable heritage, brought forth golden corn and snowy cotton in their season.

Southern intelligence expended its odors in the avenues where brilliance, not profundity, was the passport to popularity.

Hence, Southern hospitality (giving to others that which had been deliberately stolen) became almost as proverbial in the _polite_ circles of America and Europe as the long established suavity and condescension of the French.

And even unto the present time the hospitality of the South, shorn of its profuseness and grandiloquence, is frequently the theme of newspaper hacks and magazine penny-a-liners.