THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged.
When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air ontall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows,but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight.
Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is upto the top of the enclosing levee-rim, the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a dish--and as the boat swims along, high onthe flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows.
There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the peopleand destruction.
The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the citylooked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kindof Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them;for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one nightleaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt,worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and foundhis mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak,so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent upthe price of the article.
The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there wereas many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished;not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.
The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increasedin spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered.
The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets;the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still halffull of reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrelsand hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houseswere as dusty-looking as ever.
Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly,with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurryingstreet-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas crowdedwith gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode.
Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speakin broad, general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans,except in the cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy,far-seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants,but it is true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough,genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer.
It looks like a state prison. But it was built before the war.
Architecture in America may be said to have been born since the war.
New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck--to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the oppositehad been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district'
by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms.
One can do this in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Bostonwas commonplace before the fire; but now there is no commercial districtin any city in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness.
However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say.
When completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately andbeautiful building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces;no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere.
To the city, it will be worth many times its cost, for it willbreed its species. What has been lacking hitherto, was a modelto build toward; something to educate eye and taste; a SUGGESTER,so to speak.
The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious,long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city andthe city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep.
Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature.
The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potentdisease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times a day,by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never stands still,but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have been made;and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during the longintervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one of thehealthiest cities in the union. There's plenty of ice now for everybody,manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially, and hasa great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our visit,it was the best lighted city in the union, electrically speaking.
The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New York,and very much better. One had this modified noonday not only in Canaland some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch of fivemiles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style pleasureresorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is everywhere.
One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The newspapers,as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they are.
Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news, let it costwhat it may. The editorial work is not hack-grinding, but literature.
As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it may bementioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained areport of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley,from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles.
That issue of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page;two hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column;an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say,not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book.
One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans.
I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domesticarticle in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding itremains as it always was. All the dwellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I mean--and all have acomfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious;painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas,or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns.
These mansions stand in the center of large grounds,and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swellingmasses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms.
No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings,or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking.
One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty cask,painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which is proppedagainst the house-corner on stilts. There is a mansion-and-brewerysuggestion about the combination which seems very incongruous at first.
But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neithercan they conveniently have cellars, or graves,are buried in graves--by permission, I take it, not requirement;but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at public expense.
The graves are but three or four feet deep.]> the town being built upon'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain,and none of the others.
The Metropolis of the South
THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaultshave a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are builtof marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely;they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when onemoves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees theirwhite roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand,the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him.
Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order.
When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it,to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down therewould live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead,they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter wouldbe the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers,in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults:
placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children,husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow findsits inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and uglybut indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or somesuch emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellowrosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowfulbreast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention:
you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will takecare of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can;stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.
On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changesof color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.
They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle;but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that.
I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have beentrying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinelysentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.
Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages,when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground,to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air withdisease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must diebefore their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now,when even the children know that a dead saint enters upona century-long career of assassination the moment the earthcloses over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought.
The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteenhundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.
But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial,MADE several thousand people sick. Therefore thesemiracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.
St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true;but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years,and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all;and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.
Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you finda hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.
And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.
A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however;for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account isalways left unsettled.
'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:
The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases,results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters,with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also withthe SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted.'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surfacethrough eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do,and there is practically no limit to their power of escape.
'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Bartonreported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundredand fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other.
In this district were three large cemeteries, in which duringthe previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried.
In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed toaggravate the disease.
'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearanceof the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where,THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence hadbeen buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics,remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resultedin an immediate outbreak of disease.'--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO.
3, VOL. 135.
In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation,Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burdenis laid upon society by the burial of the dead:--'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals inthe United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes.
Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilitiesof all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year,and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business.
Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combinedgold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!
These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-groundsand expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciationof property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'
For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial;for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costlyand ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor,cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap[Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]>--so cheap untilthe poor got to imitating the rich, which they would doby-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muckof threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand,it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokesthat have had a rest for two thousand years.
I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavymanual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year,and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimpingis necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.
To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I waswriting one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.
He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin thatwas within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find,plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have costless than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.
He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.
Hygiene and Sentiment
ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street,whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and somethinglike this talk followed. I said--'But you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now.
Where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness?
Give me the address.'
He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notchedpink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something letteredon it, and went on chuckling while I read, 'J. B ----, UNDERTAKER.'
Then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward,and cried out--'That's what's the matter! It used to be rough times with me when youknew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular.
Big fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared;after that, dull policy-business till next fire. Town like this don'thave fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a rowthat he gets discouraged. But you bet you, this is the business!
People don't wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop offright along--there ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line.
I just started in with two or three little old coffins anda hired hearse, and now look at the thing! I've worked upa business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is.
Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now,with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.'
'Does a coffin pay so well. Is there much profit on a coffin?'
'Go-way! How you talk!' Then, with a confidential wink, a droppingof the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm;'Look here; there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap.
That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don'tever try to jew you down on. That's a coffin. There's one thingin this world which a person don't say--"I'll look around a little,and if I find I can't do better I'll come back and take it."That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a personwon't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't take in walnutif he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he can go an ironcasket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That's a coffin.
And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to worryaround after a person to get him to pay for. And that's a coffin.
Undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in Christendom,and the nobbiest.
'Why, just look at it. A rich man won't have anything but your very best;and you can just pile it on, too--pile it on and sock it to him--he won'tever holler. And you take in a poor man, and if you work him right he'llbust himself on a single lay-out. Or especially a woman. F'r instance:
Mrs. O'Flaherty comes in--widow--wiping her eyes and kind of moaning.
Unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock; says--' "And fhat might ye ask for that wan?"' "Thirty-nine dollars, madam," says I.
' "It 's a foine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried likea gintleman, as he was, if I have to work me fingers off for it.
I'll have that wan, sor."' "Yes, madam," says I, "and it is a very good one, too; not costly,to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes,as the saying is." And as she starts out, I heave in, kind of casually,"This one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but I am afraid--well, sixty-five dollars is a rather--rather--but no matter, I feltobliged to say to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy--"' "D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mateto that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"' "Yes, madam."' "Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takesthe last rap the O'Flaherties can raise; and moind you,stick on some extras, too, and I'll give ye another dollar."'And as I lay-in with the livery stables, of course I don't forget to mentionthat Mrs. O'Shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars' worth of hacks and flungas much style into Dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin.
And of course she sails in and goes the O'Shaughnessy about four hacksand an omnibus better. That used to be, but that's all played now;that is, in this particular town. The Irish got to piling up hacks so,on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry fortwo years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up.
He don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.'
'Well,' said I, 'if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times,what must you be in an epidemic?'
He shook his head.
'No, you're off, there. We don't like to see an epidemic.
An epidemic don't pay. Well, of course I don't mean that, exactly;but it don't pay in proportion to the regular thing.
Don't it occur to you, why?'
No.
'Think.'
'I can't imagine. What is it?'
'It's just two things.'
'Well, what are they?'
'One's Embamming.'
'And what's the other?'
'Ice.'
'How is that?'
'Well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice;one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come.
Takes a lot of it--melts fast. We charge jewelry rates for that ice,and war-prices for attendance. Well, don't you know, when there'san epidemic, they rush 'em to the cemetery the minute the breath's out.
No market for ice in an epidemic. Same with Embamming.
You take a family that's able to embam, and you've got a soft thing.
You can mention sixteen different ways to do it--though thereAIN'T only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom factsof it--and they'll take the highest-priced way, every time.
It's human nature--human nature in grief. It don't reason, you see.
Time being, it don't care a dam. All it wants is physical immortalityfor deceased, and they're willing to pay for it. All you've gotto do is to just be ca'm and stack it up--they'll stand the racket.
Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't GIVE away; and getyour embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hourshe is worth a cool six hundred--that's what HE'S worth. There ain'tanything equal to it but trading rats for di'monds in time of famine.
Well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to embam.
No, indeed they don't; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say--hurts it like hell-th, HEALTH, see?--Our little joke in the trade.
Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any--I mean,when you're going by, sometime.'
In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself,if any has been done. I have not enlarged on him.
With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject.
As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once,who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner--'I wouldn't worry about that, if I had your chances.'
Much he knew about it--the family all so opposed to it.
The Art of Inhumation
THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--bears no resemblance to the American end of the city:
the American end which lies beyond the interveningbrick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks;are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern,with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect;all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long,iron-railed verandas running along the several stories.
Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stainwith which time and the weather have enriched the plaster.
It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as naturala look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds.
This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated;neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.
The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is oftenexceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a largecipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling,intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made,and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable.
They are become BRIC-A-BRAC.
The party had the privilege of idling through this ancientquarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius,the author of 'the Grandissimes.' In him the South has founda masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.
In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye andvacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it,more clearly and profitably in his books than by personalcontact with it.
With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate,a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vividsense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling;you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch themimperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were,of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizonsof Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.
We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices.
There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of itas of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has everbeen used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact.
It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academyof Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light bythe benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles.
The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole-bouquets on the premisesshows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural headto the establishment.
We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in front of it;the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort,and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sunthrough the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond,where the villas are, and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commonspopulous with cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we weretold lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and didnot visit him. He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history;and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of hisname and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were hisfrom high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and becamea paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept.
When he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he hascome into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman.
To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forgetwhat he became.
Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road,with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there,in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress,top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as theapple-trees in Japanese pictures--such was our course and the surroundingsof it. There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably alongin the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank,flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watchingfor a bite.
And by-and-bye we reached the West End, a collection of hotels ofthe usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around,and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds.
We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renownedfish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.
Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End andto Spanish Fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands,take strolls in the open air under the electric lights,go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in variousand sundry other ways.
We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano.
Notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city.
He was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his fame.
In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones; as largeas one's thumb--delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled whitebait;also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small soft-shell crabsof a most superior breed. The other dishes were what one might getat Delmonico's, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken of can be hadin similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose.
In the West and South they have a new institution--the Broom Brigade.
It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume,and go through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket.
It is a very pretty sight, on private view. When they performon the stage of a theater, in the blaze of colored fires,it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle. I saw them go throughtheir complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision.
I saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom,except sweep. I did not see them sweep. But I know they could learn.
What they have already learned proves that. And if they evershould learn, and should go on the war-path down Tchoupitoulasor some of those other streets around there, those thoroughfareswould bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes.
But the girls themselves wouldn't; so nothing would be really gained,after all.
The drill was in the Washington Artillery building.
In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war.
Also a fine oil-painting representing Stonewall Jackson'slast interview with General Lee. Both men are on horseback.
Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee.
The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits,which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture,it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit itas well as another--First Interview between Lee and Jackson.
Last Interview between Lee and Jackson.
Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee.
Jackson Accepting Lee's Invitation to Dinner.
Jackson Declining Lee's Invitation to Dinner--with Thanks.
Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat.
Jackson Reporting a Great Victory.
Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.
It tells ONE story, and a sufficient one; for it says quiteplainly and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.'
The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's lastinterview if he could have done it. But he couldn't, for there wasn'tany way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information,a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.
In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in frontof the celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.'
It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture,they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever;young girl with her head in a bag.'
I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations andelisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been.
A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me,but then I was born in the South. The educated Southernerhas no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word.
He says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and 'Gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,'
and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print,but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappearfrom Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear?
The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North,nor inherited from England. Many Southerners--most Southerners--put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound.
For instance, they say Mr. K'yahtah (Carter) and speakof playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. And theyhave the pleasant custom--long ago fallen into decay inthe North--of frequently employing the respectful 'Sir.'
Instead of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they say 'Yes, Suh','No, Suh.'
But there are some infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,'
and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed.
I heard an educated gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.'
His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.'
You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been at?' And here isthe aggravated form--heard a ragged street Arab say it to a comrade:
'I was a-ask'n' Tom whah you was a-sett'n' at.' The very electcarelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and many of them say,'I didn't go to do it,' meaning 'I didn't mean to do it.'
The Northern word 'guess'--imported from England, where itused to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmenas a Yankee original--is but little used among Southerners.
They say 'reckon.' They haven't any 'doesn't' in their language;they say 'don't' instead. The unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.'
It is nearly as bad as the Northern 'hadn't ought.' This reminds methat a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood(in the North) a few days ago: 'He hadn't ought to have went.'
How is that? Isn't that a good deal of a triumph?
One knows the orders combined in this half-breed's architecturewithout inquiring: one parent Northern, the other Southern.
To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, 'Where is John gone?'
This form is so common--so nearly universal, in fact--that if shehad used 'whither' instead of 'where,' I think it would have soundedlike an affectation.
We picked up one excellent word--a word worth traveling to NewOrleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.'
They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish--so they said.
We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends inthe Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second;inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facilityin swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning,but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose.
It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.'
It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.
The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city.
When a child or a servant buys something in a shop--or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know--he finishesthe operation by saying--'Give me something for lagniappe.'
The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root,gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor--I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.
When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and thenin New Orleans--and you say, 'What, again?--no, I've had enough;'
the other party says, 'But just this one time more--this is for lagniappe.'
When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high,and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have beenbetter with the top compliment left off, he puts his 'I beg pardon--no harm intended,' into the briefer form of 'Oh, that's for lagniappe.'
If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee downthe back of your neck, he says 'For lagniappe, sah,' and gets you another cupwithout extra charge.
City Sights
IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation,once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinctsubject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There aresufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemento-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possibly five--were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two,or five to one, that the war will at no time during the eveningbecome the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greaterthat if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while.
If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six peoplewho saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ranout of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary ofthe war topic if you brought it up.
The case is very different in the South. There, every man youmeet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war.
The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in itis vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting.
Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and settheir tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail.
In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it.
All day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw;or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw;or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the wawor aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individualwas visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.
It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vastand comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by readingbooks at the fireside.
At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said,in an aside--'You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war.
It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothingelse has so strong an interest for us. And there is another reason:
In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampledall the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence,you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainlyremind some listener of something that happened during the war--and out he comes with it. Of course that brings the talk back to the war.
You may try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house,and we may all join in and help, but there can be but one result:
the most random topic would load every man up with war reminiscences,and shut him up, too; and talk would be likely to stop presently,because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you'vegot a crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burningto fetch out.'
The poet was sitting some little distance away; and presentlyhe began to speak--about the moon.
The gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:'
'There, the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but youwill see that it will suggest something to somebody about the war;in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.'
The poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surpriseto him; had had the impression that down here, toward the equator,the moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up North;had had the impression that when he visited New Orleans,many years ago, the moon--Interruption from the other end of the room--'Let me explain that. Reminds me of an anecdote.
Everything is changed since the war, for better or for worse;but you'll find people down here born grumblers, who see nochange except the change for the worse. There was an old negrowoman of this sort. A young New-Yorker said in her presence,"What a wonderful moon you have down here!" She sighed and said,"Ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo'
de waw!" '
The new topic was dead already. But the poet resurrected it,and gave it a new start.
A brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference betweenNorthern and Southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined.
Moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificialmethods of dispelling darkness. Then somebody rememberedthat when Farragut advanced upon Port Hudson on a dark night--and did not wish to assist the aim of the Confederate gunners--he carried no battle-lanterns, but painted the decks of his ships white,and thus created a dim but valuable light, which enabled hisown men to grope their way around with considerable facility.
At this point the war got the floor again--the ten minutes notquite up yet.
I was not sorry, for war talk by men who have been in a waris always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who hasnot been in the moon is likely to be dull.
We went to a cockpit in New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon.
I had never seen a cock-fight before. There were men and boys thereof all ages and all colors, and of many languages and nationalities.
But I noticed one quite conspicuous and surprising absence:
the traditional brutal faces. There were no brutal faces.
With no cock-fighting going on, you could have played the gatheringon a stranger for a prayer-meeting; and after it began,for a revival--provided you blindfolded your stranger--for the shouting was something prodigious.
A negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside.
The cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called,they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked,caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated.
The big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struckhim on the head with his spur. The gray responded with spirit.
Then the Babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceasednot thenceforth. When the cocks had been fighting some little time,I was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both were blind,red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down.
Yet they would not give up, neither would they die.
The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds,wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray,and take their heads in their mouths and hold them therea moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps;I do not know. Then, being set down again, the dyingcreatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings,find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fallexhausted once more.
I did not see the end of the battle. I forced myself to endureit as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight;so I made frank confession to that effect, and we retired.
We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring,and fighting to the last.
Evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport' for suchas have had a degree of familiarity with it. I never saw peopleenjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight.
The case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten.
They lost themselves in frenzies of delight. The 'cocking-main'
is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no questionabout that; still, it seems a much more respectable and farless cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the cocks like it;they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is notthe fox's case.
We assisted--in the French sense--at a mule race, one day.
I believe I enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there.
I enjoyed it more than I remember having enjoyed any other animalrace I ever saw. The grand-stand was well filled with the beautyand the chivalry of New Orleans. That phrase is not original with me.
It is the Southern reporter's. He has used it for two generations.
He uses it twenty times a day, or twenty thousand times a day;or a million times a day--according to the exigencies.
He is obliged to use it a million times a day, if he haveoccasion to speak of respectable men and women that often;for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one.
He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him.
There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about itthat pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. If he had been in Palestinein the early times, we should have had no references to 'much people'
out of him. No, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalryof Galilee' assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount.
It is likely that the men and women of the South are sick enoughof that phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is noimmediate prospect of their getting it.
The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style;wastes no words, and does not gush. Not so with his average correspondent.
In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand;but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that.
For instance--The 'Times-Democrat' sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last April.
This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the Captaininvited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him.
They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek.
That was all there was 'to it.' And that is all that the editorof the 'Times-Democrat' would have got out of it. There was nothingin the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it.
He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secureperfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space.
But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics.
He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them--'On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin,and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.'
Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boatshoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words,and is also destructive of compactness of statement.
The trouble with the Southern reporter is--Women. They unsettle him;they throw him off his balance. He is plain, and sensible,and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight. Then he goesall to pieces; his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic.
From reading the above extract, you would imagine that this studentof Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice, and knows next to nothingabout handling a pen. On the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs,in his long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it whenthe women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint.
For instance--'At 4 o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east, and presentlyfrom the Gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment.
It was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was a delay.
The oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the tuggingof the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature wavesin mocking of much larger bodies of water. A lull permitted a start,and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind blowing.
As darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wishthemselves nearer home.'
There is nothing the matter with that. It is good description,compactly put. Yet there was great temptation, there, to dropinto lurid writing.
But let us return to the mule. Since I left him, I have rummagedaround and found a full report of the race. In it I find confirmationof the theory which I broached just now--namely, that the troublewith the Southern reporter is Women: Women, supplemented by WalterScott and his knights and beauty and chivalry, and so on.
This is an excellent report, as long as the women stay out of it.
But when they intrude, we have this frantic result--'It will be probably a long time before the ladies'
stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as itdid yesterday. The New Orleans women are always charming,but never so much so as at this time of the year, when.
in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breathof balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable.
The stand was so crowded with them that, walking at their feetand seeing no possibility of approach, many a man appreciatedas he never did before the Peri's feeling at the Gates of Paradise,and wondered what was the priceless boon that would admit himto their sacred presence. Sparkling on their white-robedbreasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite knights,and were it not for the fact that the doughty heroes appearedon unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one ofKing Arthur's gala-days.'
There were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules,they were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects.
Some were handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek,some hadn't had their fur brushed lately; some were innocentlygay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness;guessing from looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war,some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion.
And each mule acted according to his convictions. The result was anabsence of harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety--variety of a picturesque and entertaining sort.
All the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society.
If the reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of New Orleansattend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, the thing is explained now.
It is a fashion-freak; all connected with it are people of fashion.
It is great fun, and cordially liked. The mule-race is one of the markedoccasions of the year. It has brought some pretty fast mules to the front.
One of these had to be ruled out, because he was so fast that he turnedthe thing into a one-mule contest, and robbed it of one of itsbest features--variety. But every now and then somebody disguises himwith a new name and a new complexion, and rings him in again.
The riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks,satins, and velvets.
The thirteen mules got away in a body, after a coupleof false starts, and scampered off with prodigious spirit.
As each mule and each rider had a distinct opinion of his ownas to how the race ought to be run, and which side of the trackwas best in certain circumstances, and how often the track oughtto be crossed, and when a collision ought to be accomplished,and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six conflictingopinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion,and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical.
Mile heat; time 2:22. Eight of the thirteen mules distanced.
I had a bet on a mule which would have won if the processionhad been reversed. The second heat was good fun; and so wasthe 'consolation race for beaten mules,' which followed later;but the first heat was the best in that respect.
I think that much the most enjoyable of all races isa steamboat race; but, next to that, I prefer the gayand joyous mule-rush. Two red-hot steamboats raging along,neck-and-neck, straining every nerve--that is to say,every rivet in the boilers--quaking and shaking and groaningfrom stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes,pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks,parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam--this issport that makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment.
A horse-race is pretty tame and colorless in comparison.
Still, a horse-race might be well enough, in its way,perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts.
But then, nobody is ever killed. At least, nobody was ever killedwhen I was at a horse-race. They have been crippled, it is true;but this is little to the purpose.
Southern Sports
THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which wearrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities.
I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there,twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on,clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses,planned and bought for that single night's use; and in theirtrain all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and otherdiverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show,as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the lightof its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said thatin these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented,as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;'
and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of hisgreat following of subordinates is known to any outsider.
All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence;and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mysteryin which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake,and not on account of the police.
Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but Ijudge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now.
Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary,and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters andthe oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to lookat than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabbleof the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the dayand admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holyone is reached.
This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of NewOrleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis andSt. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit.
It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North;would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a timeas it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic,not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romanticmysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles,and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South.
The very feature that keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the North or in London.
Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon itand make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would bealso its last.
Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonapartemay be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolutionbroke the chains of the ANCIEN REGIME and of the Church,and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen;and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth,and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty,that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before,they are only men, since, and can never be gods again,but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay.
Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm whichBonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debtto them for these great and permanent services to liberty,humanity, and progress.
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by hissingle might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back;sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinishforms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government;with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds,and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than anyother individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has nowoutlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not soforcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.
There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenthcentury is curiously confused and commingled with the WalterScott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical,common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed upwith the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of anabsurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.
But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed,and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is.
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Majoror a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and itwas he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.
For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and alsoreverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.
Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations andcontributions of Sir Walter.
Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existedbefore the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.
It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have hadany war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might,perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner ofthe American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War:
but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman.
The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter'sinfluence than to that of any other thing or person.
One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeplythat influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds.
If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodicalof forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy,windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact.
This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections ofthe country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition;and as a consequence, the South was able to show as manywell-known literary names, proportioned to population,as the North could.
But a change has come, and there is no opportunitynow for a fair competition between North and South.
For the North has thrown out that old inflated style,whereas the Southern writer still clings to it--clings to itand has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence.
There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as everthere was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currencyunder present conditions; the authors write for the past,not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language.
But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English,his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings;and they carry it swiftly all about America and England,and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of thevery few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style.
Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the Southought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter'stime is out.
A curious exemplification of the power of a single book forgood or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote'
and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world'sadmiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence;and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned,the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter,so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.
Enchantments and Enchanters
MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlantaat seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him.
We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals atthe hotel-counter by his correspondence with a descriptionof him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source.
He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled.
He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with thisbill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man.
Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface,but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wondersto see that it is still in about as strong force as ever.
There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all knowwho have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all knowby the same sign. I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor;but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends,and these things are permissible among friends.
He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flockedeagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrioussage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. They said--'Why, he 's white! '
They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought,that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of UncleRemus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him.
But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shyto venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours,to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness wasproof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read aboutBrer Rabbit ourselves.
Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect betterthan anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the onlymaster the country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only masterin the writing of French dialects that the country has produced;and he reads them in perfection. It was a great treat to hear himread about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous'pigshoo' representing 'Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the union,'
along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novelwhich was still in manuscript.
It came out in conversation, that in two different instancesMr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books,next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happenedto be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans.
His names were either inventions or were borrowed fromthe ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which;but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and werea good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselvesand their affairs in so excessively public a manner.
Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the bookcalled 'The Gilded Age.' There is a character in it called 'Sellers.'
I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning;but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved.
He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.'
Of course I said I could not, without stimulants. He said that awayout West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shakenhands with a man bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.'
He added--'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him offbefore this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow.
We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common,and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellersesbearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but EscholSellers is a safe name--it is a rock.'
So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week,one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic lookingwhite men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidablelibel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got hispermission to suppress an edition of ten milliontaken from memory, and probably incorrect. Think it was more.]>
copies of the book and change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers'
in future editions.
Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable
ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men,I most wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'City ofBaton Rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line.
The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step,the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decisionof hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lostin girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned.
It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and comeback at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five.
I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe.
There were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing,since they were inconspicuous.
His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her,purposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and Ijoined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood,and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug,to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along belowthe city, were a number of decayed, ram-shackly, superannuatedold steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before.
They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside,since I was here last. This gives one a realizing senseof the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefnessof its life.
Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking abovethe magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erectedby an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended,the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans.
If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood wouldnot have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted;and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president.
We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over someof those done us by Jackson's presidency.
The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitalityof the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale.
We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction enginetravels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot;then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow towarditself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane.
The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep.
The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted.
When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down nearthe ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goesrolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus riderthat could stay on it.
The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres;six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitfulorange grove of five thousand trees. The cane iscultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion,too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe;but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details.
However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundredtons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter.
These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yieldof a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre;which is three or four times what the yield of an acre wasin my time.
The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive withlittle crabs--'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewisein every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise.
Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees,and ruin them.
The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanksand vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery.
The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting.
First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind outthe juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extractthe fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol;then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses;then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then throughthe vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market.
I have jotted these particulars down from memory.
The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself.
To make sugar is really one of the most difficult thingsin the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible.
If you will examine your own supply every now and thenfor a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will findthat not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sandinto it.
We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads'
great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls,and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go,since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible.
We could have visited that ancient and singular burg,'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say;where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even tothe attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlestboys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibiouschildren are with the velocipede.
We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time,we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river wasa charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimentaland romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot,whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were alwaysthis-worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundanceof the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it.
He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song.
He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home againfrom a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-loadof such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sortof discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which sodelighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy.
Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle,to smoke and gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along,and I learned from them a great deal of what had beenhappening to my former river friends during my long absence.
I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is becomea spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has beenreceiving a letter every week from a deceased relative,through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-officein Paradise to New York, five dollars; from New York toSt. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr. Manchester very well.
I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends,one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle.
This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent andunusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew himsome three miles and knocked a tree down with him which wasfour feet through at the butt and sixty-five feet high.
He did not survive this triumph. At the ance/>
just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle,through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies,using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose.
The following is a fair example of the questions asked,and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished byManchester under the pretense that it came from the specter.
If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe him anapology--QUESTION. Where are you?
ANSWER. In the spirit world.
Q. Are you happy?
A. Very happy. Perfectly happy.
Q. How do you amuse yourself?
A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits.
Q. What else?
A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary.
Q. What do you talk about?
A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth,and how to influence them for their good.
Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land,what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but abouthow happy you all are?
No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions.
Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternityin frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness,are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject?
No reply.
Q. Would you like to come back?
A. No.
Q. Would you say that under oath?
A. Yes.
Q. What do you eat there?
A. We do not eat.
Q. What do you drink?
A. We do not drink.
Q. What do you smoke?
A. We do not smoke.
Q. What do you read?
A. We do not read.
Q. Do all the good people go to your place?
A. Yes.
Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it,in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place.
A. No reply.
Q. When did you die?
A. I did not die, I passed away.
Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have youbeen in the spirit land?
A. We have no measurements of time here.
Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to datesand times in your present condition and environment,this has nothing to do with your former condition.
You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for.
You departed on a certain day in a certain year.
Is not this true?
A. Yes.
Q. Then name the day of the month.
(Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied byviolent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time.
Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates,such things being without importance to them.)Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translationto the spirit land?
This was granted to be the case.
Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it?
(More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium.
Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.)Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question,one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will gofor nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easilyhave forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death,or were you cut off by a catastrophe?
A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) NATURAL DEATH.
This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his relativewas in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellectand an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he hadnot been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realmsof everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the restof the population there.
This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receivesletters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world,and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail.
These letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don'tknow as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followedby the receivers. One of these clients was a man whom the spirits(if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester)were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. Itis coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomeractivity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.'