by indigent parents, for gratuitous education, and possessed no
means of leaving it.

Our stay in New Orleans was not long enough to permit our
entering into society, but I was told that it contained two
distinct sets of people, both celebrated, in their way, for their
social meetings and elegant entertainments. The first of these
is composed of Creole families, who are chiefly planters and
merchants, with their wives and daughters; these meet together,
eat together, and are very grand and aristocratic; each of their
balls is a little Almack's, and every portly dame of the set is
as exclusive in her principles as the excluded but amiable
Quandroons, and such of the gentlemen of the former class as can
by any means escape from the high places, where pure Creole blood
swells the veins at the bare mention of any being tainted in the
remotest degree with the Negro stain.

Of all the prejudices I have ever witnessed, this appears to me
the most violent, and the most inveterate. Quadroon girls, the
acknowledged daughters of wealthy American or Creole fathers,
educated with all of style and accomplishments which money can
procure at New Orleans, and with all the decorum that care and
affection can give; exquisitely beautiful, graceful, gentle, and
amiable, these are not admitted, nay, are not on any terms
admissable, into the society of the Creole families of Louisiana.
They cannot marry; that is to say, no ceremony can render an
union with them legal or binding; yet such is the powerful effect
of their very peculiar grace, beauty, and sweetness of manner,
that unfortunately they perpetually become the objects of choice
and affection. If the Creole ladies have privilege to exercise