HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 
But anxious as he was to maintain this young Creole 
lady in the position and with the fortune which she 
had always enjoyed, he would not embark until he 
had accomplished, with her consent, a religious and 
holy act. This was the manumission of his slaves-—of 
those, at least, above the age of twenty-one; the 
young, whom he was prevented by the American law 
from setting free, received from him their future 
liberty, and, on attaining their majority, were to rejoin 
their parents. He never lost sight of them. They 
were always before his eyes; he knew their names, 
their ages, and their appointed hour of liberty. In 
his French home, he took note of these epochs, and 
would say, with a glow of happiness, ‘To-day, such 
an one becomes free !’ 
“See my father now in his native country, happy 
in a residence near his birth-place—building, planting, 
bringing up his family, the centre of a young world in 
which everything sprung from him: the house, the 
garden, were his creation; even his wife, whom he had 
reared and trained, and whom everybody thought to 
be his daughter. My mother was so young that her 
eldest daughter seemed to be her sister. Five other 
children followed, almost in as many successive years, 
promptly enwreathing my father with a living garland, 
which was his special pride. Few families exhibited a 
greater variety of tastes and temperaments; the two worlds 
were distinctly represented in ours: the French of the 
south with the sparkling vivacity of Languedoc—the grave 
colonists of Louisiana marked from their birth with the 
phlegmatic idiosyncrasies of the American character. 
