CHAP. XXL] FASIIIONISTS. 1,5 



only twenty-five years ago, before any habitations of 

 the white men were to be seen in the forest here. 

 It was precisely one of those wooden forts so faith 

 fully described by Cooper in the &quot;Path-finder.&quot; After 

 the mind has become interested with such antiquities, 

 it is carried back the next moment to the modern 

 state of things by an extraordinary revulsion, when 

 a fellow-passenger, proud of the sudden growth of 

 his adopted city, tells you that another large building, 

 also conspicuous on a height, is a female seminary 

 lately established by the Methodists, &quot; where all the 

 young ladies take degrees ;&quot; and then, as you pace 

 the streets with your baggage to the hotel, another 

 says to you, &quot; There go two of our fashionists,&quot; 

 pointing to two gaily-dressed ladies, in the latest 

 Parisian costume. 



I had seen, in the pale countenances of the whites 

 in the pine-woods I had lately travelled through, 

 the signs of much fever and ague prevalent in the 

 hot season in Georgia, but at Macon we heard 

 chiefly of consumptive patients, who have fled from 

 the Northern States in the hope of escaping the cold 

 of winter. The frost, this year, has tried them se 

 verely in the South. Two days before I reached 

 Macon, a young northern man had died in the hotel 

 where my wife w r as staying, a melancholy event, as 

 none of his friends or relatives were near him. Lucy, 

 the chambermaid of the hotel, an intelligent bright 

 mulatto, from Maryland, who expressed herself as 

 well as any white woman, came to tell my wife that 

 the other ladies of the house were to be present at the 

 funeral, and invited her to attend. She found the two 



