arrive there shipwrecked. He furnished himself with a pedler's stock in New Orleans and started up the coast on foot, his pack strapped to his back. This was the beginning of great commercial connections all over the Mississippi Valley. Into his pedler's pack (if the fanciful figure be permitted) Poydras put all the favour of his handsome face and pleasing address, and all the unswerving morality, indefatigable energy, unimpeachable honour, the generosity, the charity—all the virtues, in fact, which distinguished his long after-life and all the picturesque and poetical impulses that made him the lover of Clio and the bard of Galvez. Out of it came plantations, slaves, palatial houses, honours, wealth to his family, and princely charities to his state and city. There may be those who would criticise the poetry or the poem; but they are not Louisianians. And, at any rate, who would criticise either Galvez or Poydras? Do we not remember him, the latter, through our great-grandparents, in his venerable and rather melancholy old age, dressed always in his Louis XV. costume, dispensing the kindly hospitality of his sumptuous plantation to all, from the duke of Orleans, stopping in 1798 to visit him, to the pedler trudging along the coast, as he had done, pack on back; or voyaging up and down the river in the flatboat that he had furnished and equipped in such wondrously luxurious comfort; or posting to Washington, to confer, by invitation, with the president about the state of Louisiana. He died as no man had yet died in Louisiana, leaving an endowment in perpetuity to charity; founding an asylum for orphan boys in the city, bequeathing forty thousand dollars to the Charity Hospital, thirty thousand dollars to establish a college for orphan boys
