The Works Of Washington Irving Wolferts Roost PDF Download

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CREOLE VILLAGE. A SKETCH FROM A STEAMBOAT. First published in 1837.] ]N travelling about our motley country, I am often reminded of Ariosto's account of the moon, in which the good paladin Astolpho found everything garnered up that had been lost on earth. So I am apt to imagine that many things lost in the Old World are treasured up in the New; having been handed down from generation to generation, since the early days of the colonies. A European antiquary, therefore, curious in his researches after the ancient and almost obliterated customs and usages of his country, would do well to put himself ipon the track of some early band of emigrants, follow them across the Atlantic, and rummage among their descendants on our shores. In the phraseology of New England might be found many an old English provincial phrase, long since obsolete in the parent country; with gome quaint relics of the Roundheads; while Virginia cherishes peculiarities characteristic of the days of Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh. In the same way, the sturdy yeomanry of New Jersey and Pennsylvania keep up many usages fading away in ancient Germany; while many an honest, broad-bottomed custom, nearly extinct in venerable Holland, may be found nourishing in pristine vigor and luxuriance in Dutch villages, on the banks of the Mohawk and the Hudson. In no part of our country, however, are the customs and peculiarities imported from the old world by the earlier settlers kept up with more fidelity than in the little, poverty-stricken villages of Spanish and French origin, which border the rivers of ancient Louisiana. Their population is generally made up of the descendants of those nations, married and interwoven together, and occasionally crossed with a slight dash of the Indian. The Frenc...