customers. These wooden churches or meetinghouses are all new, all painted white, or perhaps a bright red. Hard by is a tavern with a green paling, as clean and as new as the churches, and there are also various smart stores and neat dwelling-houses; all new, all wooden, all clean, and all ornamented with slight Grecian pillars. The whole has a cheerful, trim and flourishing aspect. Houses, churches, stores and taverns, all are of a piece. They are suited to the present emergency, whatever that may be, though they will never make fine ruins. Every thing proclaims prosperity, equality, consistency; the past forgotten, the present all in all, and the future taking care of itself. No delicate attentions to posterity, who can never pay its debts. No beggars. If a man has even a hole in his coat, he must be lately from the Emerald Isle.
Transport yourself in imagination from this New England village to that of
, it matters not which, not far from Mexico. "Look on this picture, and on that." The Indian huts, with their half-naked inmates, and little gardens full of flowers; the huts themselves either built of clay, or the half ruined beaux restes of some stone building. At a little distance an hacienda, like a deserted palace, built of solid masonry, with its inner patio surrounded by thick stone pillars, with great walls and iron-barred windows that might stand a siege. Here a ruined arch and cross, so solidly built, that one cannot but wonder how the stones ever crumbled away. There, rising in the midst of old faithful-looking trees, the church, grey and ancient, but strong as if