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life on the mississippi by mark twain chapter 34 tough yarns stack island. i remembered stack island; alsolake providence, louisiana--which is the first distinctly southern-lookingtown you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-treeshung with venerable gray beards of spanish moss; 'restful, pensive,sunday aspect about the place,' comments uncle mumford, with feeling--alsowith truth. a mr. h. furnished some minor details of factconcerning this region

which i would have hesitated to believe ifi had not known him to be a steamboat mate. he was a passenger of ours,a resident of arkansas city, and bound to vicksburg to join his boat, alittle sunflower packet. he was an austere man, and had the reputationof being singularly unworldly, for a river man. among other things,he said that arkansas had been injured and kept back by generationsof exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here. one may smile,said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but whenyou come to look at the effects produced, in the way of discouragementof immigration, and

diminished values of property, it was quitethe opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise to be cougheddown or sneered at. these mosquitoes had been persistently representedas being formidable and lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble,insignificant in size, diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on,and so on; you would have supposed he was talking about his family.but if he was soft on the arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough onthe mosquitoes of lake providence to make up for it--'those lakeprovidence colossi,' as he finely called them. he said that two of themcould whip a dog, and that

four of them could hold a man down; and excepthelp come, they would kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it.referred in a sort of casual way--and yet significant way--to 'thefact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown in lake providence--theytake out a mosquito policy besides.' he told many remarkablethings about those lawless insects. among others, said he hadseen them try to vote. noticing that this statement seemed to bea good deal of a strain on us, he modified it a little: said he might havebeen mistaken, as to that particular, but knew he had seen them aroundthe polls 'canvassing.'

there was another passenger--friend of h.'s--whobacked up the harsh evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailedsome stirring adventures which he had had with them. the stories werepretty sizable, merely pretty sizable; yet mr. h. was continuallyinterrupting with a cold, inexorable 'wait--knock off twenty-five percent. of that; now go on;' or, 'wait--you are getting that too strong;cut it down, cut it down--you get a leetle too much costumeryon to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;'or, 'pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more on tothat statement, you want to

get a couple of lighters and tow the rest,because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stickto facts--just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen wantfor a book is the frozen truth--ain't that so, gentlemen?' he explainedprivately that it was necessary to watch this man all the time,and keep him within bounds; it would not do to neglect this precaution,as he, mr. h., 'knew to his sorrow.' said he, 'i will not deceive you;he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it swelled my left ear up,and spread it so that i was actually not able to see out around it; itremained so for months, and

people came miles to see me fan myself withit.' chapter 35 vicksburg during the trouble we used to plow past the lofty hill-city,vicksburg, down-stream; but we cannot do that now. a cut-off has madea country town of it, like osceola, st. genevieve, and several others.there is currentless water --also a big island--in front of vicksburgnow. you come down the river the other side of the island, then turn andcome up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can'tcome up, but must land some distance below it.

signs and scars still remain, as remindersof vicksburg's tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippledby the cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc.the caves did good service during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--may8 to july 4, 1863. they were used by the non-combatants--mainlyby the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to forsafety on occasion. they were mere holes, tunnels, driven into theperpendicular clay bank, then branched y shape, within the hill. life invicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are somematerials out of which to

reproduce it:-- population, twenty-seven thousand soldiersand three thousand non-combatants; the city utterly cut off fromthe world--walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear bysoldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside;no passing to and fro; no god-speeding a parting guest, no welcominga coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast,mornings--a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence,also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distanceup or down, and plowing

toward the town--for none came, the riverlay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station,no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobsof hackmen--all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel,sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound,rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently,no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets;nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants ofexhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence; silence sodead that the measured

tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seeminglyimpossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps thestillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashesof artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red linesstreaming from soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragmentsdescends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets whichare not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of franticwomen and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cavedungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'rats, toyour holes!' and laugh.

the cannon-thunder rages, shells scream andcrash overhead, the iron rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three,possibly six, then stops; silence follows, but the streets are stillempty; the silence continues; by-and-bye a head projects from a cave hereand there and yonder, and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence stillcontinuing, bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creaturesgroup themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deepdraughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the nextcave; maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through thetown, if the stillness

continues; and will scurry to the holes again,by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more. there being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merelythe population of a village--would they not cometo know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly; insomuch thatthe fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest toall? those are the materials furnished by history.from them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life ofthat time in vicksburg? could you, who did not experience it, come nearerto reproducing it to the

imagination of another non-participant thancould a vicksburger who did experience it? it seems impossible; and yetthere are reasons why it might not really be. when one makes his firstvoyage in a ship, it is an experience which multitudinously bristleswith striking novelties; novelties which are in such sharp contrastwith all this person's former experiences that they take a seeminglydeathless grip upon his imagination and memory. by tongue or pen hecan make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over withhim; make him see it all and feel it all. but if he wait? if he make tenvoyages in succession--what

then? why, the thing has lost color, snap,surprise; and has become commonplace. the man would have nothing totell that would quicken a landsman's pulse. years ago, i talked with a couple of the vicksburgnon-combatants--a man and his wife. left to tell their story intheir own way, those people told it without fire, almost without interest. a week of their wonderful life there wouldhave made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had sixweeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to beingbomb-shelled out of home

and into the ground; the matter became commonplace.after that, the possibility of their ever being startlinglyinteresting in their talks about it was gone. what the man said was tothis effect:-- 'it got to be sunday all the time. seven sundaysin the week--to us, anyway. we hadn't anything to do, and timehung heavy. seven sundays, and all of them broken up at one time or another,in the day or in the night, by a few hours of the awful storm offire and thunder and iron. at first we used to shin for the holes a gooddeal faster than we did afterwards. the first time, i forgot the children,and maria fetched

them both along. when she was all safe inthe cave she fainted. two or three weeks afterwards, when she was runningfor the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big shell burstnear her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carriedaway her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head. well,she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again! wasgetting used to things already, you see. we all got so that we couldtell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always gounder shelter if it was a light shower. us men would loaf around andtalk; and a man would say,

'there she goes!' and name the kind of shellit was from the sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't anydanger from it. if a shell was bursting close over us, we stoppedtalking and stood still;--uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn'tsafe to move. when it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybesaying, 'that was a ripper!' or some such commonplace commentbefore we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away highin the air overhead. in that case, every fellow just whipped outa sudden, 'see you again, gents!' and shoved. often and often i sawgangs of ladies promenading

the streets, looking as cheerful as you please,and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and i've seenthem stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was goingto do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa'ntered alongagain, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict. streetsin some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of onesort or another lying around. ours hadn't; they had iron litter.sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shellsin his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in hisfront yard--a ton of it,

sometimes. no glass left; glass couldn't standsuch a bombardment; it was all shivered out. windows of the housesvacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. whole panes were asscarce as news. 'we had church sundays. not many there, alongat first; but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts. i've seen service stopa minute, and everybody sit quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-likethen--and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash goingon outside and overhead; and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, servicewould go on again. organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardmentis a powerful queer

combination--along at first. coming out ofchurch, one morning, we had an accident--the only one that happened aroundme on a sunday. i was just having a hearty handshake with a friendi hadn't seen for a while, and saying, 'drop into our cave to-night,after bombardment; we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.' whiskey, iwas going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted. a chunk of it cutthe man's arm off, and left it dangling in my hand. and do you know thething that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everythingelse, little and big, i reckon, is the mean thought i had then?it was 'the whiskey is saved.'

and yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable;because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just thatlittle; never had another taste during the siege. 'sometimes the caves were desperately crowded,and always hot and close. sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-fivepeople packed into it; no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes,you couldn't have made a candle burn in it. a child was born in oneof those caves one night, think of that; why, it was like having itborn in a trunk. 'twice we had sixteen people in our cave;and a number of times we had a

dozen. pretty suffocating in there. we alwayshad eight; eight belonged there. hunger and misery and sickness andfright and sorrow, and i don't know what all, got so loaded into themthat none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege.they all died but three of us within a couple of years. one night a shellburst in front of the hole and caved it in and stopped it up. it waslively times, for a while, digging out. some of us came near smothering.after that we made two openings--ought to have thought of it at first. 'mule meat. no, we only got down to that thelast day or two. of course

it was good; anything is good when you arestarving. this man had kept a diary during--six weeks?no, only the first six days. the first day, eight close pages; thesecond, five; the third, one--loosely written; the fourth, three orfour lines; a line or two the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diaryabandoned; life in terrific vicksburg having now become commonplace andmatter of course. the war history of vicksburg has more aboutit to interest the general reader than that of any other of the river-towns.it is full of variety, full of incident, full of the picturesque.vicksburg held out longer

than any other important river-town, and sawwarfare in all its phases, both land and water--the siege, the mine,the assault, the repulse, the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine. the most beautiful of all the national cemeteriesis here. over the great gateway is this inscription:-- "here rest in peace 16,600 who died for theircountry in the years 1861 to 1865." the grounds are nobly situated; being veryhigh and commanding a wide prospect of land and river. they are tastefullylaid out in broad

terraces, with winding roads and paths; andthere is profuse adornment in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,'and in one part is a piece of native wild-wood, left just as itgrew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm. everything about this cemeterysuggests the hand of the national government. the government's workis always conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness.the government does its work well in the first place, and then takescare of it. by winding-roads--which were often cut toso great a depth between perpendicular walls that they were mere rooflesstunnels--we drove out a

mile or two and visited the monument whichstands upon the scene of the surrender of vicksburg to general grant bygeneral pemberton. its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippingswhich so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; butthe brick foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye.it overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines;and is not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in floweringweeds. the battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to thenational cemetery. on the road, a quarter of a mile townward,an aged colored man showed

us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell whichhas lain in his yard since the day it fell there during the siege. 'i was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin'heah; de dog he went for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it;but i didn't; i says, "jes' make you'seff at home heah; lay still whahyou is, or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind to, but i's got businessout in de woods, i has!"' vicksburg is a town of substantial businessstreets and pleasant residences; it commands the commerce of theyazoo and sunflower rivers; is pushing railways in several directions,through rich agricultural

regions, and has a promising future of prosperityand importance. apparently, nearly all the river towns, bigand little, have made up their minds that they must look mainly torailroads for wealth and upbuilding, henceforth. they are acting uponthis idea. the signs are, that the next twenty years will bring aboutsome noteworthy changes in the valley, in the direction of increasedpopulation and wealth, and in the intellectual advancement and the liberalizingof opinion which go naturally with these. and yet, if one mayjudge by the past, the river towns will manage to find and use a chance,here and there, to cripple

and retard their progress. they kept themselvesback in the days of steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage-duesso stupidly graded as to prohibit what may be called small retailtraffic in freights and passengers. boats were charged such heavywharfage that they could not afford to land for one or two passengers ora light lot of freight. instead of encouraging the bringing of tradeto their doors, the towns diligently and effectively discouraged it.they could have had many boats and low rates; but their policy renderedfew boats and high rates compulsory. it was a policy which extended--andextends--from new

orleans to st. paul. we had a strong desire to make a trip up theyazoo and the sunflower--an interesting region at any time, but additionallyinteresting at this time, because up there the great inundationwas still to be seen in force--but we were nearly sure to have towait a day or more for a new orleans boat on our return; so we were obligedto give up the project. here is a story which i picked up on boardthe boat that night. i insert it in this place merely because it is a goodstory, not because it belongs here--for it doesn't. it was toldby a passenger--a college

professor--and was called to the surface inthe course of a general conversation which began with talk about horses,drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk about thelynching of the gamblers in vicksburg half a century ago, then intotalk about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight,in a dispute over free trade and protection. chapter 36 the professor's yarn it was in the early days. i was not a collegeprofessor then. i was a humble-minded young land-surveyor, with theworld before me--to survey,

in case anybody wanted it done. i had a contractto survey a route for a great mining-ditch in california, and iwas on my way thither, by sea --a three or four weeks' voyage. there werea good many passengers, but i had very little to say to them; readingand dreaming were my passions, and i avoided conversation in order to indulgethese appetites. there were three professional gamblers on board--rough,repulsive fellows. i never had any talk with them, yet i couldnot help seeing them with some frequency, for they gambled in an upper-deckstateroom every day and night, and in my promenades i often had glimpsesof them through their

door, which stood a little ajar to let outthe surplus tobacco smoke and profanity. they were an evil and hateful presence,but i had to put up with it, of course. there was one other passenger who fell undermy eye a good deal, for he seemed determined to be friendly with me,and i could not have gotten rid of him without running some chance ofhurting his feelings, and i was far from wishing to do that. besides,there was something engaging in his countrified simplicity and his beaminggood-nature. the first time i saw this mr. john backus, i guessed,from his clothes and his

looks, that he was a grazier or farmer fromthe backwoods of some western state--doubtless ohio--and afterwardwhen he dropped into his personal history and i discovered that hewas a cattle-raiser from interior ohio, i was so pleased with my ownpenetration that i warmed toward him for verifying my instinct. he got to dropping alongside me every day,after breakfast, to help me make my promenade; and so, in the course oftime, his easy-working jaw had told me everything about his business,his prospects, his family, his relatives, his politics--in fact everythingthat concerned a backus,

living or dead. and meantime i think he hadmanaged to get out of me everything i knew about my trade, my tribe,my purposes, my prospects, and myself. he was a gentle and persuasivegenius, and this thing showed it; for i was not given to talking about mymatters. i said something about triangulation, once; the stately wordpleased his ear; he inquired what it meant; i explained; after that hequietly and inoffensively ignored my name, and always called me triangle. what an enthusiast he was in cattle! at thebare name of a bull or a cow, his eye would light and his eloquenttongue would turn itself

loose. as long as i would walk and listen,he would walk and talk; he knew all breeds, he loved all breeds, he caressedthem all with his affectionate tongue. i tramped along in voicelessmisery whilst the cattle question was up; when i could endureit no longer, i used to deftly insert a scientific topic into theconversation; then my eye fired and his faded; my tongue fluttered,his stopped; life was a joy to me, and a sadness to him. one day he said, a little hesitatingly, andwith somewhat of diffidence--

'triangle, would you mind coming down to mystateroom a minute, and have a little talk on a certain matter?' i went with him at once. arrived there, heput his head out, glanced up and down the saloon warily, then closed thedoor and locked it. he sat down on the sofa, and he said-- 'i'm a-going to make a little propositionto you, and if it strikes you favorable, it'll be a middling good thingfor both of us. you ain't a-going out to californy for fun, nuther ami--it's business, ain't that so? well, you can do me a good turn, and socan i you, if we see fit.

i've raked and scraped and saved, a considerablemany years, and i've got it all here.' he unlocked an old hairtrunk, tumbled a chaos of shabby clothes aside, and drew a short stoutbag into view for a moment, then buried it again and relocked the trunk.dropping his voice to a cautious low tone, he continued, 'she's allthere--a round ten thousand dollars in yellow-boys; now this is my littleidea: what i don't know about raising cattle, ain't worth knowing.there's mints of money in it, in californy. well, i know, and you know,that all along a line that 's being surveyed, there 's little dabs ofland that they call "gores,"

that fall to the surveyor free gratis fornothing. all you've got to do, on your side, is to survey in such a way thatthe "gores" will fall on good fat land, then you turn 'em over to me,i stock 'em with cattle, in rolls the cash, i plank out your shareof the dollars regular, right along, and--' i was sorry to wither his blooming enthusiasm,but it could not be helped. i interrupted, and said severely-- 'i am not that kind of a surveyor. let uschange the subject, mr. backus.'

it was pitiful to see his confusion and hearhis awkward and shamefaced apologies. i was as much distressed as hewas--especially as he seemed so far from having suspected that there wasanything improper in his proposition. so i hastened to console himand lead him on to forget his mishap in a conversational orgy about cattleand butchery. we were lying at acapulco; and, as we went on deck, it happenedluckily that the crew were just beginning to hoist some beeves aboardin slings. backus's melancholy vanished instantly, and with itthe memory of his late mistake.

'now only look at that!' cried he; 'my goodness,triangle, what would they say to it in ohio. wouldn't their eyesbug out, to see 'em handled like that?--wouldn't they, though?' all the passengers were on deck to look--eventhe gamblers--and backus knew them all, and had afflicted them allwith his pet topic. as i moved away, i saw one of the gamblers approach andaccost him; then another of them; then the third. i halted; waited;watched; the conversation continued between the four men; it grew earnest;backus drew gradually away; the gamblers followed, and kept at hiselbow. i was uncomfortable.

however, as they passed me presently, i heardbackus say, with a tone of persecuted annoyance-- 'but it ain't any use, gentlemen; i tell youagain, as i've told you a half a dozen times before, i warn't raisedto it, and i ain't a-going to resk it.' i felt relieved. 'his level head will be hissufficient protection,' i said to myself. during the fortnight's run from acapulco tosan francisco i several times saw the gamblers talking earnestly withbackus, and once i threw

out a gentle warning to him. he chuckled comfortablyand said-- 'oh, yes! they tag around after me considerable--wantme to play a little, just for amusement, they say--butlaws-a-me, if my folks have told me once to look out for that sort oflive-stock, they've told me a thousand times, i reckon.' by-and-bye, in due course, we were approachingsan francisco. it was an ugly black night, with a strong wind blowing,but there was not much sea. i was on deck, alone. toward ten i startedbelow. a figure issued from the gamblers' den, and disappeared inthe darkness. i experienced

a shock, for i was sure it was backus. i flewdown the companion-way, looked about for him, could not find him,then returned to the deck just in time to catch a glimpse of him as he re-enteredthat confounded nest of rascality. had he yielded at last? i fearedit. what had he gone below for?--his bag of coin? possibly. i drewnear the door, full of bodings. it was a-crack, and i glanced inand saw a sight that made me bitterly wish i had given my attention tosaving my poor cattle-friend, instead of reading and dreaming my foolishtime away. he was gambling. worse still, he was being plied with champagne,and was already showing

some effect from it. he praised the 'cider,'as he called it, and said now that he had got a taste of it he almostbelieved he would drink it if it was spirits, it was so good and so aheadof anything he had ever run across before. surreptitious smiles, atthis, passed from one rascal to another, and they filled all the glasses,and whilst backus honestly drained his to the bottom they pretended todo the same, but threw the wine over their shoulders. i could not bear the scene, so i wanderedforward and tried to interest myself in the sea and the voices of the wind.but no, my uneasy spirit

kept dragging me back at quarter-hour intervals;and always i saw backus drinking his wine--fairly and squarely, andthe others throwing theirs away. it was the painfullest night i everspent. the only hope i had was that we might reachour anchorage with speed--that would break up the game. i helpedthe ship along all i could with my prayers. at last we went booming throughthe golden gate, and my pulses leaped for joy. i hurried back to thatdoor and glanced in. alas, there was small room for hope--backus's eyeswere heavy and bloodshot, his sweaty face was crimson, his speech maudlinand thick, his body

sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motionof the ship. he drained another glass to the dregs, whilst the cardswere being dealt. he took his hand, glanced at it, and his dulleyes lit up for a moment. the gamblers observed it, and showed theirgratification by hardly perceptible signs. 'how many cards?' 'none!' said backus. one villain--named hank wiley--discarded onecard, the others three each. the betting began. heretofore the betshad been trifling--a dollar

or two; but backus started off with an eaglenow, wiley hesitated a moment, then 'saw it' and 'went ten dollarsbetter.' the other two threw up their hands. backus went twenty better. wiley said-- 'i see that, and go you a hundred better!'then smiled and reached for the money. 'let it alone,' said backus, with drunkengravity. 'what! you mean to say you're going to coverit?' 'cover it? well, i reckon i am--and lay anotherhundred on top of it,

too.' he reached down inside his overcoat and producedthe required sum. 'oh, that's your little game, is it? i seeyour raise, and raise it five hundred!' said wiley. 'five hundred better.' said the foolish bull-driver,and pulled out the amount and showered it on the pile. the threeconspirators hardly tried to conceal their exultation. all diplomacy and pretense were dropped now,and the sharp exclamations came thick and fast, and the yellow pyramidgrew higher and higher. at

last ten thousand dollars lay in view. wileycast a bag of coin on the table, and said with mocking gentleness-- 'five thousand dollars better, my friend fromthe rural districts--what do you say now?' 'i call you!' said backus, heaving his goldenshot-bag on the pile. 'what have you got?' 'four kings, you d--d fool!' and wiley threwdown his cards and surrounded the stakes with his arms. 'four aces, you ass!' thundered backus, coveringhis man with a cocked

revolver. 'i'm a professional gambler myself,and i've been laying for you duffers all this voyage!' down went the anchor, rumbledy-dum-dum! andthe long trip was ended. well--well, it is a sad world. one of thethree gamblers was backus's 'pal.' it was he that dealt the fateful hands.according to an understanding with the two victims, he wasto have given backus four queens, but alas, he didn't. a week later, i stumbled upon backus--arrayedin the height of fashion--in montgomery street. he said, cheerily,as we were parting--

'ah, by-the-way, you needn't mind about thosegores. i don't really know anything about cattle, except what i was ableto pick up in a week's apprenticeship over in jersey just beforewe sailed. my cattle-culture and cattle-enthusiasm have served their turn--ishan't need them any more.' next day we reluctantly parted from the 'golddust' and her officers, hoping to see that boat and all those officersagain, some day. a thing which the fates were to render tragicallyimpossible! chapter 37 the end of the 'gold dust'

for, three months later, august 8, while iwas writing one of these foregoing chapters, the new york papers broughtthis telegram-- a terrible disaster. seventeen persons killed by an explosion onthe steamer 'gold dust.' 'nashville, aug. 7.--a despatch from hickman,ky., says-- 'the steamer "gold dust" exploded her boilersat three o'clock to-day, just after leaving hickman. forty-seven personswere scalded and seventeen are missing. the boat was landedin the eddy just above the town, and through the exertions of the citizensthe cabin passengers,

officers, and part of the crew and deck passengerswere taken ashore and removed to the hotels and residences. twenty-fourof the injured were lying in holcomb's dry-goods store at onetime, where they received every attention before being removed to morecomfortable places.' a list of the names followed, whereby it appearedthat of the seventeen dead, one was the barkeeper; and among theforty-seven wounded, were the captain, chief mate, second mate, and secondand third clerks; also mr. lem s. gray, pilot, and several members ofthe crew. in answer to a private telegram, we learnedthat none of these was

severely hurt, except mr. gray. letters receivedafterward confirmed this news, and said that mr. gray was improvingand would get well. later letters spoke less hopefully of hiscase; and finally came one announcing his death. a good man, a most companionableand manly man, and worthy of a kindlier fate. chapter 38 the house beautiful we took passage in a cincinnati boat for neworleans; or on a cincinnati boat--either is correct; the former is theeastern form of putting it, the latter the western.

mr. dickens declined to agree that the mississippisteamboats were 'magnificent,' or that they were 'floatingpalaces,'--terms which had always been applied to them; terms whichdid not over-express the admiration with which the people viewed them. mr. dickens's position was unassailable, possibly;the people's position was certainly unassailable. if mr. dickenswas comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the taj, orwith the matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful thing whichhe had seen, they were not magnificent--he was right. the people comparedthem with what they had

seen; and, thus measured, thus judged, theboats were magnificent--the term was the correct one, it was not at alltoo strong. the people were as right as was mr. dickens. the steamboatswere finer than anything on shore. compared with superior dwelling-housesand first-class hotels in the valley, they were indubitably magnificent,they were 'palaces.' to a few people living in new orleans and st.louis, they were not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but tothe great majority of those populations, and to the entire populationsspread over both banks between baton rouge and st. louis, they werepalaces; they tallied with

the citizen's dream of what magnificence was,and satisfied it. every town and village along that vast stretchof double river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--thehome of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. itis easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling fence paintedwhite--in fair repair; brick walk from gate to door; big, square,two-story 'frame' house, painted white and porticoed like a greciantemple--with this difference, that the imposing fluted columns and corinthiancapitals were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted;iron knocker; brass door

knob--discolored, for lack of polishing. within,an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards; opening out of it, a parlor,fifteen feet by fifteen--in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingraincarpet; mahogany center-table; lamp on it, with green-papershade--standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-coloredyarns, by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp-mat; severalbooks, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness, according to aninherited and unchangeable plan; among them, tupper, much penciled; also,'friendship's offering,' and 'affection's wreath,' with their sappyinanities illustrated

in die-away mezzotints; also, ossian; 'alonzoand melissa:' maybe 'ivanhoe:' also 'album,' full of original'poetry' of the thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-theebreed; two or three goody-goody works--'shepherd of salisburyplain,' etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous godey's'lady's book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure women with mouthsall alike--lips and eyelids the same size--each five-foot womanwith a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting-onto be half of her foot. polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention),with pipe passing

through a board which closes up the discardedgood old fireplace. on each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace,a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, alldone in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals--whichthey don't. over middle of mantel, engraving--washington crossingthe delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and-lightningcrewels by one of the young ladies--work of art whichwould have made washington hesitate about crossing, if he could haveforeseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. piano--kettle indisguise--with music, bound

and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand nearby: battle of prague; bird waltz; arkansas traveler; rosin the bow;marseilles hymn; on a lone barren isle (st. helena); the last link isbroken; she wore a wreath of roses the night when last we met; go, forgetme, why should sorrow o'er that brow a shadow fling; hours there wereto memory dearer; long, long ago; days of absence; a life on the oceanwave, a home on the rolling deep; bird at sea; and spread open on therack, where the plaintive singer has left it, ro-holl on, silver moo-hoon,guide the trav-el-lerr his way, etc. tilted pensively against thepiano, a guitar--guitar

capable of playing the spanish fandango byitself, if you give it a start. frantic work of art on the wall--piousmotto, done on the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimesin faded grasses: progenitor of the 'god bless our home' ofmodern commerce. framed in black moldings on the wall, other works ofarts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; beinggrim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitarysail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthraciteprecipice; name of criminal conspicuous in the corner. lithograph, napoleoncrossing the alps.

lithograph, the grave at st. helena. steel-plates,trumbull's battle of bunker hill, and the sally from gibraltar.copper-plates, moses smiting the rock, and return of the prodigal son.in big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil: papa holding a book('constitution of the united states'); guitar leaning against mamma, blueribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, inslippers and scalloped pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, theother beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma,who simpers back. these persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparentlyskinned. opposite, in

gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirtyand twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved,glaring pallidly out from a background of solid egyptian night. undera glass french clock dome, large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-whitewax. pyramidal what-not in the corner, the shelves occupiedchiefly with bric-a-brac of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect:shell, with the lord's prayer carved on it; another shell--of thelong-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long, runningfrom end to end--portrait of washington carved on it; not well done;the shell had washington's

mouth, originally--artist should have builtto that. these two are memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to neworleans and the french market. other bric-a-brac: californian 'specimens'--quartz,with gold wart adhering; old guinea-gold locket, withcirclet of ancestral hair in it; indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair ofbead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the plains; three 'alum' basketsof various colors--being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubesof crystallized alum in the rock-candy style--works of art which wereachieved by the young ladies; their doubles and duplicates to befound upon all what-nots

in the land; convention of desiccated bugsand butterflies pinned to a card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--dropsits under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candyrabbit--limbs and features merged together, not stronglydefined; pewter presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-boardwood-sawyer, to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated bythe heat; small napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes ofdim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudesbut customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufacturedlandscape stretching away in

the distance--that came in later, with thephotograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed--metalindicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid goldbronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of themuncomfortable in inflexible sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectatorcannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband andwife generally grouped together--husband sitting, wife standing,with hand on his shoulder--and both preserving, all these fading years, sometraceable effect of the daguerreotypist's brisk 'now smile, if youplease!' bracketed over

what-not--place of special sacredness--anoutrage in water-color, done by the young niece that came on a visit longago, and died. pity, too; for she might have repented of this intime. horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from underyou. window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castlesstenciled on them in fierce colors. lambrequins dependent fromgaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded. bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteadsof the 'corded' sort, with a sag in the middle, the cords needingtightening; snuffy feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane-seatchairs, splint-bottomed

rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slatesize, veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly--butnot certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers.nothing else in the room. not a bathroom in the house; and no visitorlikely to come along who has ever seen one. that was the residence of the principal citizen,all the way from the suburbs of new orleans to the edge of st.louis. when he stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new andmarvelous world: chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--andmaybe painted red;

pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards,all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns;gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell;gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck,painted blue, and furnished with windsor armchairs; inside,a far-receding snow-white 'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture onevery stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched up withgilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista; big chandeliersevery little way, each an april shower of glittering glass-drops;lovely rainbow-light falling

everywhere from the colored glazing of theskylights; the whole a long-drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewilderingand soul-satisfying spectacle! in the ladies' cabin a pink andwhite wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravishing patternof gigantic flowers. then the bridal chamber--the animal that inventedthat idea was still alive and unhanged, at that day--bridal chamberwhose pretentious flummery was necessarily overawing to thenow tottering intellect of that hosannahing citizen. every state-roomhad its couple of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snugcloset; and sometimes

there was even a washbowl and pitcher, andpart of a towel which could be told from mosquito netting by an expert--thoughgenerally these things were absent, and the shirt-sleevedpassengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls in the barbershop, where were also public towels, public combs, and public soap. take the steamboat which i have just described,and you have her in her highest and finest, and most pleasing, andcomfortable, and satisfactory estate. now cake her over with a layer ofancient and obdurate dirt, and you have the cincinnati steamer awhileago referred to. not all

over--only inside; for she was ably officeredin all departments except the steward's. but wash that boat and repaint her, and shewould be about the counterpart of the most complimented boatof the old flush times: for the steamboat architecture of the west hasundergone no change; neither has steamboat furniture and ornamentationundergone any. chapter 39 manufactures and miscreants where the river, in the vicksburg region,used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight--made so bycut-off; a former distance

of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five.it is a change which threw vicksburg's neighbor, delta, louisiana, outinto the country and ended its career as a river town. its whole river-frontageis now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with youngtrees--a growth which will magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye,and completely hide the exiled town. in due time we passed grand gulf and rodney,of war fame, and reached natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--forbaton rouge, yet to come, is not on a hill, but only on highground. famous

natchez-under-the-hill has not changed notablyin twenty years; in outward aspect--judging by the descriptionsof the ancient procession of foreign tourists--it has not changed insixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby. it had a desperatereputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboatingtimes--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there,among the riff-raff of the river, in those days. but natchez-on-top-of-the-hillis attractive; has always been attractive. even mrs. trollope(1827) had to confess its charms:

'at one or two points the wearisome levelline is relieved by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground.the town of natchez is beautifully situated on one of those highspots. the contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismalline of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growthof the pawpaw, palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scentedflowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis inthe desert. natchez is the furthest point to the north at which orangesripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter. withthe exception of this

sweet spot, i thought all the little townsand villages we passed wretched-looking in the extreme.' natchez, like her near and far river neighbors,has railways now, and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thitherinto all rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her.and like vicksburg and new orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makesthirty tons of ice a day. in vicksburg and natchez, in my time, icewas jewelry; none but the rich could wear it. but anybody and everybody canhave it now. i visited one of the ice-factories in new orleans, to seewhat the polar regions

might look like when lugged into the edgeof the tropics. but there was nothing striking in the aspect of the place.it was merely a spacious house, with some innocent steam machineryin one end of it and some big porcelain pipes running here and there. no,not porcelain--they merely seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammoniawhich was being breathed through them had coated them to the thicknessof your hand with solid milk-white ice. it ought to have melted; forone did not require winter clothing in that atmosphere: but it did notmelt; the inside of the pipe was too cold.

sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes,a foot square and two feet long, and open at the top end. thesewere full of clear water; and around each box, salt and other properstuff was packed; also, the ammonia gases were applied to the water insome way which will always remain a secret to me, because i was not ableto understand the process. while the water in the boxes gradually froze,men gave it a stir or two with a stick occasionally--to liberate theair-bubbles, i think. other men were continually lifting out boxes whosecontents had become hard frozen. they gave the box a single dip intoa vat of boiling water, to

melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin,then they shot the block out upon a platform car, and it was readyfor market. these big blocks were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. in certainof them, big bouquets of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers hadbeen frozen-in; in others, beautiful silken-clad french dolls, and otherpretty objects. these blocks were to be set on end in a platter,in the center of dinner-tables, to cool the tropical air; andalso to be ornamental, for the flowers and things imprisoned in themcould be seen as through plate glass. i was told that this factory couldretail its ice, by wagon,

throughout new orleans, in the humblest dwelling-housequantities, at six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficientprofit. this being the case, there is business for ice-factoriesin the north; for we get ice on no such terms there, if one take less thanthree hundred and fifty pounds at a delivery. the rosalie yarn mill, of natchez, has a capacityof 6,000 spindles and 160 looms, and employs 100 hands. the natchezcotton mills company began operations four years ago in a two-story buildingof 50 x 190 feet, with 4,000 spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000,all subscribed in the

town. two years later, the same stockholdersincreased their capital to $225,000; added a third story to the mill,increased its length to 317 feet; added machinery to increase the capacityto 10,300 spindles and 304 looms. the company now employ 250 operatives,many of whom are citizens of natchez. 'the mill works 5,000bales of cotton annually and manufactures the best standard quality ofbrown shirtings and sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000yards of these goods per year.'{footnote [new orleans times-democrat,26 aug, 1882.]} a close corporation--stock held at $5,000 per share,but none in the market.

the changes in the mississippi river are greatand strange, yet were to be expected; but i was not expecting to liveto see natchez and these other river towns become manufacturing strongholdsand railway centers. speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talkupon that topic which i heard--which i overheard--on board the cincinnatiboat. i awoke out of a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion ofvoices in my ears. i listened--two men were talking; subject, apparently,the great inundation. i looked out through the opentransom. the two men were eating a late breakfast; sitting oppositeeach other; nobody else

around. they closed up the inundation witha few words--having used it, evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--thenthey dropped into business. it soon transpiredthat they were drummers--one belonging in cincinnati, the other in neworleans. brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god,how to get it their religion. 'now as to this article,' said cincinnati,slashing into the ostensible butter and holding forward a slab of it onhis knife-blade, 'it's from our house; look at it--smell of it--tasteit. put any test on it you

want to. take your own time--no hurry--makeit thorough. there now--what do you say? butter, ain't it. notby a thundering sight--it's oleomargarine! yes, sir, that's what it is--oleomargarine.you can't tell it from butter; by george, an expertcan't. it's from our house. we supply most of the boats in the west; there'shardly a pound of butter on one of them. we are crawling right along--jumpingright along is the word. we are going to have that entire trade.yes, and the hotel trade, too. you are going to see the day, prettysoon, when you can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, inany hotel in the mississippi

and ohio valleys, outside of the biggest cities.why, we are turning out oleomargarine now by the thousands oftons. and we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has gotto take it--can't get around it you see. butter don't stand any show--thereain't any chance for competition. butter's had its day--and fromthis out, butter goes to the wall. there's more money in oleomargarinethan--why, you can't imagine the business we do. i've stopped in everytown from cincinnati to natchez; and i've sent home big orders fromevery one of them.' and so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer,in the same fervid

strain. then new orleans piped up and said-- yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's acertainty; but it ain't the only one around that's first-rate. for instance,they make olive-oil out of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that youcan't tell them apart.' 'yes, that's so,' responded cincinnati, 'andit was a tip-top business for a while. they sent it over and broughtit back from france and italy, with the united states custom-housemark on it to indorse it for genuine, and there was no end of cash in it;but france and italy broke up the game--of course they naturally would.cracked on such a rattling

impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn'tstand the raise; had to hang up and quit.' 'oh, it did, did it? you wait here a minute.' goes to his state-room, brings back a coupleof long bottles, and takes out the corks--says: 'there now, smell them, taste them, examinethe bottles, inspect the labels. one of 'm's from europe, the other'snever been out of this country. one's european olive-oil, the other'samerican cotton-seed olive-oil. tell 'm apart? 'course you can't.nobody can. people that

want to, can go to the expense and troubleof shipping their oils to europe and back--it's their privilege; butour firm knows a trick worth six of that. we turn out the whole thing--cleanfrom the word go--in our factory in new orleans: labels, bottles, oil,everything. well, no, not labels: been buying them abroad--get themdirt-cheap there. you see, there's just one little wee speck, essence,or whatever it is, in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give ita smell, or a flavor, or something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectlyeasy then to turn the oil into any kind of oil you wantto, and there ain't anybody

that can detect the true from the false. well,we know how to get that one little particle out--and we're the onlyfirm that does. and we turn out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable!we are doing a ripping trade, too--as i could easily showyou by my order-book for this trip. maybe you'll butter everybody'sbread pretty soon, but we'll cotton-seed his salad for him from the gulfto canada, and that's a dead-certain thing.' cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration.the two scoundrels exchanged business-cards, and rose. as theyleft the table, cincinnati

said-- 'but you have to have custom-house marks,don't you? how do you manage that?' i did not catch the answer. we passed port hudson, scene of two of themost terrific episodes of the war--the night-battle there between farragut'sfleet and the confederate land batteries, april 14th, 1863; and thememorable land battle, two months later, which lasted eight hours--eighthours of exceptionally fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally,in the repulse of the

union forces with great slaughter. chapter 40 castles and culture baton rouge was clothed in flowers, like abride--no, much more so; like a greenhouse. for we were in the absolutesouth now--no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. themagnolia-trees in the capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with theirdense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms. the scent of the floweris very sweet, but you want distance on it, because it is so powerful.they are not good bedroom blossoms--they might suffocate one in hissleep. we were certainly

in the south at last; for here the sugar regionbegins, and the plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-milland negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance--werein view. and there was a tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelterin the air. and at this point, also, begins the pilot'sparadise: a wide river hence to new orleans, abundance of water from shoreto shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road. sir walter scott is probably responsible forthe capitol building; for it is not conceivable that this little shamcastle would ever have been

built if he had not run the people mad, acouple of generations ago, with his medieval romances. the south hasnot yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. admirationof his fantastic heroes and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings andromantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which isalready perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-centurysmell of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflatedlanguage and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. it ispathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materialsall ungenuine

within and without, pretending to be whatthey are not--should ever have been built in this otherwise honorableplace; but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehoodundergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would havebeen so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began,and then devote this restoration-money to the building of somethinggenuine. baton rouge has no patent on imitation castles,however, and no monopoly of them. here is a picture from the advertisementof the 'female institute' of columbia; tennessee. the followingremark is from the same

advertisement-- 'the institute building has long been famedas a model of striking and beautiful architecture. visitors are charmedwith its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with itstowers, turreted walls, and ivy-mantled porches.' keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing;as romantic as keeping hotel in a castle. by itself the imitation castle is doubtlessharmless, and well enough; but as a symbol and breeder and sustainerof maudlin middle-age

romanticism here in the midst of the plainestand sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all thecenturies the world has seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing anda mistake. here is an extract from the prospectus ofa kentucky 'female college.' female college sounds well enough; but sincethe phrasing it in that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interestof brevity, it seems to me that she-college would have been stillbetter--because shorter, and means the same thing: that is, if eitherphrase means anything at all--

'the president is southern by birth, by rearing,by education, and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern insentiment, and with the exception of those born in europe were bornand raised in the south. believing the southern to be the highest typeof civilization this continent has seen, the young ladies are trainedaccording to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood,religion, and propriety; hence we offer a first-class femalecollege for the south and solicit southern patronage.' {footnote [illustrations of it thoughtlesslyomitted by the advertiser:

knoxville, tenn., october 19.--this morninga few minutes after ten o'clock, general joseph a. mabry, thomas o'connor,and joseph a. mabry, jr., were killed in a shooting affray. thedifficulty began yesterday afternoon by general mabry attacking majoro'connor and threatening to kill him. this was at the fair grounds, ando'connor told mabry that it was not the place to settle their difficulties.mabry then told o'connor he should not live. it seems that mabry wasarmed and o'connor was not. the cause of the difficulty was an old feudabout the transfer of some property from mabry to o'connor. later inthe afternoon mabry sent word

to o'connor that he would kill him on sight.this morning major o'connor was standing in the door of the mechanics'national bank, of which he was president. general mabry and anothergentleman walked down gay street on the opposite side from the bank.o'connor stepped into the bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aimat general mabry and fired. mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side.as he fell o'connor fired again, the shot taking effect in mabry's thigh.o'connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun. aboutthis time joseph a. mabry, jr., son of general mabry, came rushing downthe street, unseen by

o'connor until within forty feet, when theyoung man fired a pistol, the shot taking effect in o'connor's right breast,passing through the body near the heart. the instant mabry shot, o'connorturned and fired, the load taking effect in young mabry's rightbreast and side. mabry fell pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantlyo'connor fell dead without a struggle. mabry tried to rise, butfell back dead. the whole tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neitherof the three spoke after he was shot. general mabry had aboutthirty buckshot in his body. a bystander was painfully wounded in the thighwith a buckshot, and

another was wounded in the arm. four othermen had their clothing pierced by buckshot. the affair caused greatexcitement, and gay street was thronged with thousands of people. generalmabry and his son joe were acquitted only a few days ago of themurder of moses lusby and don lusby, father and son, whom they killed afew weeks ago. will mabry was killed by don lusby last christmas. majorthomas o'connor was president of the mechanics' national bank here, andwas the wealthiest man in the state.--associated press telegram. one day last month, professor sharpe, of thesomerville, tenn.,

female college, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,'was told that his brother-in-law, a captain burton, had threatenedto kill him. burton, t seems, had already killed one man and drivenhis knife into another. the professor armed himself with a double-barreledshot gun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, found him playingbilliards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. the 'memphis avalanche'reports that the professor's course met with pretty generalapproval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in theactual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself.

about the same time, two young men in northcarolina quarreled about a girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged.friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains.on the 24th the young men met in the public highway. one of them hada heavy club in his hand, the other an ax. the man with the club foughtdesperately for his life, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. awell-directed blow sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the nextmoment he was a dead man. about the same time, two 'highly connected'young virginians, clerks in a hardware store at charlottesville, while'skylarking,' came to blows.

peter dick threw pepper in charles roads'seyes; roads demanded an apology; dick refused to give it, and it wasagreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the partieshad no pistols, and it was too late at night to procure them.one of them suggested that butcher-knives would answer the purpose, andthe other accepted the suggestion; the result was that roads fellto the floor with a gash in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal.if dick has been arrested, the news has not reached us. he 'expresseddeep regret,' and we are told by a staunton correspondent of the philadelphiapress that 'every

effort has been made to hush the matter up.'--extractsfrom the public journals.]} what, warder, ho! the man that can blow socomplacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle. from baton rouge to new orleans, the greatsugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretchtheir league-wide levels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypressin the rear. shores lonely no longer. plenty of dwellingsall the way, on both banks--standing so close together, for longdistances, that the broad

river lying between the two rows, becomesa sort of spacious street. a most home-like and happy-looking region.and now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house,embowered in trees. here is testimony of one or two of the processionof foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago. mrs. trollopesays-- 'the unbroken flatness of the banks of themississippi continued unvaried for many miles above new orleans;but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex,and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was manydays before we were weary of

looking at them.' captain basil hall-- 'the district of country which lies adjacentto the mississippi, in the lower parts of louisiana, is everywherethickly peopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas,trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave anexceedingly thriving air to the river scenery. all the procession paint the attractive picturein the same way. the descriptions of fifty years ago do not needto have a word changed in

order to exactly describe the same regionas it appears to-day--except as to the 'trigness' of the houses. the whitewashis gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most,of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint andhave a decayed, neglected look. it is the blight of the war. twenty-oneyears ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,'just as it had been in 1827, as described by those tourists. unfortunate tourists! people humbugged themwith stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them for believing andprinting the same. they

told mrs. trollope that the alligators--orcrocodiles, as she calls them--were terrible creatures; and backedup the statement with a blood-curdling account of how one of theseslandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a womanand five children. the woman, by herself, would have satisfiedany ordinarily-impossible alligator; but no, these liars must make himgorge the five children besides. one would not imagine that jokersof this robust breed would be sensitive--but they were. it is difficult,at this day, to understand, and impossible to justify, the reception whichthe book of the grave,

honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable,well-meaning capt. basil hall got. chapter 41 the metropolis of the south the approaches to new orleans were familiar;general aspects were unchanged. when one goes flying through londonalong a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspectmiles of upper bedrooms through the open windows, but the lower halfof the houses is under his level and out of sight. similarly, inhigh-river stage, in the new orleans region, the water is up to the topof the enclosing levee-rim,

the flat country behind it lies low--representingthe 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 atthe upper end of the city looked as they had always looked; warehouseswhich had had a kind of aladdin's lamp experience, however, sincei had seen them; for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed onenight leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, wortha 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 suddenlyand to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the priceof the article. the vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged,and there were as many ships as ever: but the long array ofsteamboats had vanished; not altogether, of course, but not much of itwas left. the city itself had not changed--to the eye.it had greatly increased in spread and population, but the look ofthe town was not altered. the dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deepin the streets; the deep,

trough-like gutters alongside the curbstoneswere still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface; thesidewalks were still--in the sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casksand barrels and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercialhouses were as dusty-looking as ever. canal street was finer, and more attractiveand stirring than formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its severalprocessions of hurrying street-cars, and--toward evening--its broadsecond-story verandas crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothedaccording to the latest mode.

not that there is any 'architecture' in canalstreet: to speak in broad, general terms, there is no architecture innew orleans, except in the cemeteries. it seems a strange thing to sayof a wealthy, far-seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a millioninhabitants, but it is true. there is a huge granite u.s. custom-house--costlyenough, genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferiorto a gasometer. it looks like a state prison. but it was built before thewar. 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 thebad luck--to have had no great

fire in late years. it must be so. if theopposite had been the case, i think one would be able to tell the 'burntdistrict' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the oldforms. one can do this in boston and chicago. the 'burnt district'of boston was commonplace before the fire; but now there is no commercialdistrict in any city in the world that can surpass it--or perhapseven rival it--in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness. however, new orleans has begun--just thismoment, as one may say. when completed, the new cotton exchange will bea stately and beautiful

building; massive, substantial, full of architecturalgraces; no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about itanywhere. to the city, it will be worth many times its cost, for it willbreed its species. what has been lacking hitherto, was a model to buildtoward; something to educate eye and taste; a suggester, so to speak. the city is well outfitted with progressivemen--thinking, sagacious, long-headed men. the contrast between thespirit of the city and the city's architecture is like the contrast betweenwaking and sleep. apparently there is a 'boom' in everythingbut that one dead feature.

the water in the gutters used to be stagnantand slimy, and a potent disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushednow, two or three times a day, by powerful machinery; in many of thegutters the water never stands still, but has a steady current. othersanitary improvements have been made; and with such effect that new orleansclaims to be (during the long intervals between the occasionalyellow-fever assaults) one of the healthiest cities in the union. there'splenty of ice now for everybody, manufactured in the town. it isa driving place commercially, and has a great river, ocean, and railwaybusiness. at the date of our

visit, it was the best lighted city in theunion, electrically speaking. the new orleans electric lights were morenumerous than those of new york, and very much better. one had this modifiednoonday not only in canal and some neighboring chief streets,but all along a stretch of five miles of river frontage. there aregood clubs in the city now--several of them but recently organized--andinviting modern-style pleasure resorts at west end and spanish fort.the telephone is everywhere. one of the most notable advancesis in journalism. the newspapers, as i remember them, were not astriking feature. now they

are. money is spent upon them with a freehand. they get the news, let it cost what it may. the editorial workis not hack-grinding, but literature. as an example of new orleans journalisticachievement, it may be mentioned that the 'times-democrat'of august 26, 1882, contained a report of the year's business of the townsof the mississippi valley, from new orleans all the way to st. paul--twothousand miles. that issue of the paper consisted of forty pages; sevencolumns to the page; two hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteenhundred words to the column; an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousandwords. that is to say,

not much short of three times as many wordsas there are in this book. one may with sorrow contrast this with thearchitecture of new orleans. i have been speaking of public architectureonly. the domestic article in new orleans is reproachless, notwithstandingit remains as it always was. all the dwellings are of wood--in theamerican part of the town, i mean--and all have a comfortable look. thosein the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snow-white usually, andgenerally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamentalcolumns. these mansions stand in the center of large grounds, andrise, garlanded with roses,

out of the midst of swelling masses of shininggreen foliage and many-colored blossoms. no houses could wellbe in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to theeye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking. one even becomes reconciled to the cisternpresently; this is a mighty cask, painted green, and sometimes a coupleof stories high, which is propped against the house-corner on stilts.there is a mansion-and-brewery suggestion about the combinationwhich seems very incongruous at first. but the people cannothave wells, and so they

take rain-water. neither can they convenientlyhave cellars, or graves,{footnote [the israelites are buriedin graves--by permission, i take it, not requirement; but none else, exceptthe destitute, who are buried at public expense. the graves are butthree or four feet deep.]} the town being built upon 'made' ground; sothey do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of theothers. chapter 42 hygiene and sentiment they bury their dead in vaults, above theground. these vaults have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples;are built of marble,

generally; are architecturally graceful andshapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when onemoves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their whiteroofs 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 cemeteriesare beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. when one goes fromthe levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observesto himself that if those people down there would live as neatly whilethey are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find manyadvantages in it; and besides,

their quarter would be the wonder and admirationof the business world. fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to beseen at the portals of many of the vaults: placed there by the pious handsof bereaved parents and children, husbands and wives, and reneweddaily. a milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancerin the coarse and ugly but indestructible 'immortelle'--which isa wreath or cross or some such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, withsometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kindof sorrowful breast-pin, so to say. the immortelle requires no attention:you just hang it up, and

there you are; just leave it alone, it willtake care 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--gracefullestof legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts ofthe vaults, and catch flies. their changes of color--as to variety--arenot up to the creature's reputation. they change color when a personcomes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feelingreptile would do that.

i will gradually drop this subject of graveyards.i have been trying all i could to get down to the sentimentalpart of it, but i cannot accomplish it. i think there is no genuinelysentimental part to it. it is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. graveyardsmay have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobodyknew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earthand the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, ormaybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they arehardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint entersupon a century-long

career of assassination the moment the earthcloses over his corpse. it is a grim sort of a thought. the relics ofst. anne, up in canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone tocuring the sick by the dozen. but it is merest matter-of-course that thesesame relics, within a generation after st. anne's death and burial,made several thousand people sick. therefore these miracle-performancesare simply compensation, nothing more. st. anne is somewhatslow pay, for a saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteenhundred years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, thannot 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 find a hundred andfifty that take the benefit of the statute. and none of them pay any morethan the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest eithersimple or compound. a saint can never quite return the principal,however; for his dead body kills people, whereas his relics heal only--theynever restore the dead to life. that part of the account is alwaysleft unsettled. 'dr. f. julius le moyne, after fifty yearsof medical practice, wrote: "the inhumation of human bodies, dead frominfectious diseases, results

in constantly loading the atmosphere, andpolluting the waters, with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction,but also with the specific germs of the diseases from whichdeath resulted." 'the gases (from buried corpses) will riseto the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gaswill do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape. 'during the epidemic in new orleans in 1853,dr. e. h. barton reported that in the fourth district the mortalitywas four hundred and fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of anyother. in this district were

three large cemeteries, in which during theprevious year more than three thousand bodies had been buried. inother districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease. 'in 1828 professor bianchi demonstrated howthe fearful reappearance of the plague at modena was caused by excavationsin ground where, three hundred years previously, the victims of thepestilence had been buried. mr. cooper, in explaining the causes of someepidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at eyamresulted in 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 somestriking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by theburial of the dead:-- 'one and one-fourth times more money is expendedannually in funerals in the united states than the government expendsfor public-school purposes. funerals cost this country in 1880enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failuresin the united states during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capitalof $8,630 with which to resume business. funerals cost annually moremoney than the value of the

combined gold and silver yield of the unitedstates in the year 1880! these figures do not include the sums investedin burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the lossfrom depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.' for the rich, cremation would answer as wellas burial; for the ceremonies connected with it could be madeas costly and ostentatious as a hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremationwould be better than burial, because so cheap {footnote [four orfive dollars is the minimum cost.]}--so cheap until the poor got to imitatingthe rich, which they

would do by-and-bye. the adoption of cremationwould relieve us of a muck of 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 hisliving by odd jobs and heavy manual labor. he never earns above four hundreddollars in a year, and as he has a wife and several young children,the closest scrimping is necessary to get him through to the end ofthe twelve months debtless. to such a man a funeral is a colossal financialdisaster. while i was

writing one of the preceding chapters, thisman lost a little child. he walked the town over with a friend, tryingto find a coffin that was within his means. he bought the very cheapestone he could find, plain wood, stained. it cost him twenty-six dollars.it would have cost less than four, probably, if it had been builtto put something useful into. he and his family will feel that outlay agood many months. chapter 43 the art of inhumation about the same time, i encountered a man inthe street, whom i had not seen for six or seven years; and somethinglike this talk followed. i

'but you used to look sad and oldish; youdon't now. where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness?give me the address.' he chuckled blithely, took off his shiningtile, pointed to a notched pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown,with something lettered on it, and went on chuckling while i read, 'j.b----, undertaker.' then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverenttilt to leeward, and cried out-- 'that's what's the matter! it used to be roughtimes with me when you knew me--insurance-agency business, you know;mighty irregular. big

fire, all right--brisk trade for ten dayswhile people scared; after that, dull policy-business till next fire.town like this don't have fires often enough--a fellow strikes so manydull weeks in a row that he gets discouraged. but you bet you, thisis the business! people don't wait for examples to die. no, sir, they dropoff right along--there ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line.i just started in with two or three little old coffins and a hiredhearse, and now look at the thing! i've worked up a business here thatwould satisfy any man, don't care who he is. five years ago, lodged inan attic; live in a swell

house now, with a mansard roof, and all themodern inconveniences.' 'does a coffin pay so well. is there muchprofit on a coffin?' 'go-way! how you talk!' then, with a confidentialwink, a dropping of the voice, and an impressive laying of hishand on my arm; 'look here; there's one thing in this world which isn'tever cheap. that's a coffin. there's one thing in this world which a persondon't ever 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, andif 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 person won't take in pine ifhe can go walnut; and won't take in walnut if he can go mahogany; andwon't take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door-plateand bronze handles. that's a coffin. and there's one thing in this worldwhich you don't have to worry around after a person to get him topay for. and that's a coffin. undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest businessin christendom, and the nobbiest. 'why, just look at it. a rich man won't haveanything but your very best; and you can just pile it on, too--pileit on and sock it to

him--he won't ever holler. and you take ina poor man, and if you work him right he'll bust himself on a single lay-out.or especially a woman. f'r instance: mrs. o'flaherty comes in--widow--wipingher eyes and kind of moaning. unhandkerchiefs one eye, batsit 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 shallbe buried like a gintleman, as he was, if i have to work mefingers off for it. i'll have

that wan, sor." '"yes, madam," says i, "and it is a very goodone, too; not costly, to be sure, but in this life we must cut ourgarment to our clothes, as the saying is." and as she starts out, i heavein, 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--butno matter, i felt obliged to say to mrs. o'shaughnessy--" '"d'ye mane to soy that bridget o'shaughnessybought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil topurgatory in?"

'"yes, madam." '"then pat shall go to heaven in the twinto it, if it takes the last rap the o'flaherties can raise; and moindyou, 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 mention that mrs. o'shaughnessy hired fifty-fourdollars' worth of hacks and flung as much style into dennis's funeralas if he had been a duke or an assassin. and of course she sails inand goes the o'shaughnessy about four hacks and an omnibus better. thatused 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 funeralleft them ragged and hungry for two years afterward; so the priest pitchedin and broke it all up. he don't allow them to have but two hacksnow, and sometimes only one.' 'well,' said i, 'if you are so light-heartedand 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 seean 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'tit 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, andwe lay him up in ice; one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friendsto come. takes a lot of it--melts fast. we charge jewelry rates forthat 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'sout. no market for ice in an epidemic. same with embamming. you take afamily that's able to embam, and you've got a soft thing. you can mentionsixteen different ways to do it--though there ain't only one or twoways, when you come down to

the bottom facts of it--and they'll take thehighest-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 immortality for deceased, and they're willingto pay for it. all you've got to do is to just be ca'm and stack itup--they'll stand the racket. why, man, you can take a defunct that youcouldn't give away; and get your embamming traps around you and go towork; and in a couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred--that's whathe's worth. there ain't anything equal to it but trading rats fordi'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 hurtsthe 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 callwhenever you need any--i mean, when you're going by, sometime.' in his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggeratinghimself, 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 thatremark to my pastor once,

who said, with what he seemed to think wasan impressive manner-- 'i wouldn't worry about that, if i had yourchances.' much he knew about it--the family all so opposed to it. chapter 44 city sights the old french part of new orleans--ancientlythe spanish part--bears no resemblance to the american end of the city:the american end which lies beyond the intervening brick 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 pleasanteffect; all are plastered

on the outside, and nearly all have long,iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. their chief beautyis the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and theweather have enriched the plaster. it harmonizes with all the surroundings,and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flushupon sunset clouds. this charming decoration cannot be successfullyimitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in america. the iron railings are a specialty, also. thepattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy andgraceful--with a large cipher

or monogram in the center, a delicate cobwebof baffling, intricate forms, wrought in steel. the ancient railingsare hand-made, and are now comparatively rare and proportionatelyvaluable. they are become bric-a-brac. the party had the privilege of idling throughthis ancient quarter of new orleans with the south's finest literarygenius, the author of 'the grandissimes.' in him the south has founda masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. in truth, ifind by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspectit, and learn of it, and judge

of it, more clearly and profitably in hisbooks than by personal contact with it. with mr. cable along to see for you, and describeand explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarteris a vivid pleasure. and you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seenthings--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features,but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through thevision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sightedstranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of alps with aninspired and enlightened

long-sighted native. we visited the old st. louis hotel, now occupiedby municipal offices. there is nothing strikingly remarkable aboutit; but one can say of it as of the academy of music in new york, thatif a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantialevidence to back up the fact. it is curious that cabbages and hayand things do not grow in the academy of music; but no doubt it is on accountof the interruption of the light by the benches, and the impossibilityof hoeing the crop except in the aisles. the fact that theushers grow their

buttonhole-bouquets on the premises showswhat might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head tothe establishment. we visited also the venerable cathedral, andthe pretty square in front of it; the one dim with religious light, theother brilliant with the worldly sort, and lovely with orange-treesand blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sun through the wildernessof houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond, where the villas are,and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous withcows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were told liethe ashes of an early pirate;

but we took him on trust, and did not visithim. he was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history; and aslong as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of hisname and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverencewere his from high and low; but when at last he descended into politicsand became a paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turnedaside and wept. when he died, they set up a monument over him; andlittle by little he has come into respect again; but it is respect forthe pirate, not the alderman. to-day the loyal and generous remember onlywhat he was, and charitably

forget what 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 woodon the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbedand moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut againstthe sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in japanese pictures--suchwas our course and the surroundings of it. there was an occasionalalligator swimming comfortably along in the canal, and an occasionalpicturesque colored person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigidreflection upon the still

water and watching for a bite. and by-and-bye we reached the west end, acollection of hotels of the usual light summer-resort pattern, with broadverandas all around, and the waves of the wide and blue lake pontchartrainlapping the thresholds. we had dinner on a ground-verandaover the water--the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano,delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. thousands of people come by rail and carriageto west end and to spanish fort every evening, and dine, listen to thebands, take strolls in

the open air under the electric lights, gosailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various and sundryother ways. we had opportunities on other days and inother places to test the pompano. notably, at an editorial dinner atone of the clubs in the city. he was in his last possible perfectionthere, and justified his fame. in his suite was a tall pyramid of scarletcray-fish--large ones; as large as one's thumb--delicate, palatable,appetizing. also deviled whitebait; also shrimps of choice quality;and a platter of small soft-shell crabs of a most superior breed.the other dishes were what

one might get at delmonico's, or buckinghampalace; those i have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in neworleans only, i suppose. in the west and south they have a new institution--thebroom brigade. it is composed of young ladies who dress ina uniform costume, and go through the infantry drill, with broom inplace of musket. it is a very pretty sight, on private view. when theyperform on 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. isaw 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. whatthey have already learned proves that. and if they ever should learn,and should go on the war-path down tchoupitoulas or some of thoseother streets around there, those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improvedaspect 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 artillerybuilding. in this building we saw many interesting relics of the war.also a fine oil-painting

representing stonewall jackson's last interviewwith general lee. both men are on horseback. jackson has just riddenup, and is accosting lee. the picture is very valuable, on account ofthe portraits, which are authentic. but, like many another historicalpicture, it means nothing without its label. and one label will fitit as 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--withthanks. 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 quite plainly and satisfactorily, 'here are lee and jacksontogether.' the artist would have made it tell that this is lee and jackson'slast interview if he could have done it. but he couldn't, for therewasn't any way to do it. a good legible label is usually worth,for information, a ton of

significant attitude and expression in a historicalpicture. in rome, people with fine sympathetic natures standup and weep in front of the celebrated 'beatrice cenci the day beforeher 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 intonationsand elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. a southernertalks music. at least it is music to me, but then i was bornin the south. the educated

southerner has no use for an r, except atthe 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, inprint, but they have it to the ear. when did the r disappear from southernspeech, and how did it come to disappear? the custom of droppingit was not borrowed from the north, nor inherited from england. manysoutherners--most southerners--put a y into occasional wordsthat begin with the k sound. for instance, they say mr. k'yahtah (carter)and speak of playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. and theyhave the pleasant

custom--long ago fallen into decay in thenorth--of frequently employing the respectful 'sir.' instead of the curtyes, 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 cookor his butler would have said, 'like the flag-officer done.' you heargentlemen say, 'where have you been at?' and here is the aggravated form--hearda ragged street arab say it to a comrade: 'i was a-ask'n'tom whah you was a-sett'n'

at.' the very elect carelessly 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 fromengland, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satiricalenglishmen as a yankee original--is but little used among southerners.they say 'reckon.' they haven't any 'doesn't' in their language; theysay 'don't' instead. the unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.'it is nearly as bad as the northern 'hadn't ought.' this remindsme that 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 combinedin this half-breed's architecture without inquiring: one parentnorthern, the other southern. to-day i heard a schoolmistress ask, 'whereis john gone?' this form is so common--so nearly universal, in fact--thatif she had used 'whither' instead of 'where,' i think it would havesounded like an affectation. we picked up one excellent word--a word worthtraveling to new orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.'they pronounce it lanny-yap. it is spanish--sothey 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; inquiredwhat it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swingingit the fourth. it has a restricted meaning, but i think the peoplespread it out a little when they choose. it is the equivalent of the thirteenthroll 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 mayoror the governor, for aught i know--he finishes the operation by saying--

'give me something for lagniappe.' the shopman always responds; gives the childa bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spoolof thread, gives the governor--i don't know what he gives the governor;support, likely. when you are invited to drink, and this doesoccur now and then in new orleans--and you say, 'what, again?--no, i'vehad enough;' the other party says, 'but just this one time more--thisis for lagniappe.' when the beau perceives that he is stacking hiscompliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenancethat the edifice would

have been better with the top compliment leftoff, he puts his 'i beg pardon--no harm intended,' into the brieferform of 'oh, that's for lagniappe.' if the waiter in the restaurantstumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says'for lagniappe, sah,' and gets you another cup without extra charge. chapter 45 southern sports in the north one hears the war mentioned,in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week;but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved ofduty. there are sufficient

reasons for this. given a dinner company ofsix gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possiblyfive--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 evening becomethe topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that ifit become the topic it will remain so but a little while. if you add sixladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little ofthe dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning themyears ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you broughtit up.

the case is very different in the south. there,every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw thewar. the war is the great chief topic of conversation. the interestin it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting.mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going,when nearly any other topic would fail. in the south, the war iswhat 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 tenyeahs befo' the waw or

aftah the waw. it shows how intimately everyindividual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.it gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast andcomprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by readingbooks at the fireside. at a club one evening, a gentleman turnedto me and said, in an aside-- 'you notice, of course, that we are nearlyalways talking about the war. it isn't because we haven't anything elseto talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest forus. and there is another reason: in the war, each of us, in his ownperson, seems to have sampled

all the different varieties of human experience;as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sortbut it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened duringthe war--and out he comes with it. of course that brings the talkback to the war. you may try all you want to, to keep other subjectsbefore the house, and we may all join in and help, but there can be butone 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've gota crimson fact or fancy in

your head that you are burning to fetch out.' the poet was sitting some little distanceaway; and presently he began to speak--about the moon. the gentleman who had been talking to me remarkedin an 'aside:' 'there, the moon is far enough from the seat of war,but you will see that it will suggest something to somebody about thewar; in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.' the poet was saying he had noticed somethingwhich was a surprise to him; had had the impression that down here,toward the equator, the

moonlight was much stronger and brighter thanup 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; butyou'll find people down here born grumblers, who see no change except thechange for the worse. there was an old negro woman of this sort. a youngnew-yorker said in her presence, "what a wonderful moon you havedown here!" she sighed and said, "ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you oughtto seen dat moon befo' de

waw!"' the new topic was dead already. but the poetresurrected it, and gave it a new start. a brief dispute followed, as to whether thedifference between northern and southern moonlight really existed or wasonly imagined. moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificialmethods of dispelling darkness. then somebody remembered that whenfarragut advanced upon port hudson on a dark night--and did not wishto assist the aim of the confederate gunners--he carried no battle-lanterns,but painted the

decks of his ships white, and thus createda dim but valuable light, which enabled his own men to grope their wayaround with considerable facility. at this point the war got the flooragain--the ten minutes not quite up yet. i was not sorry, for war talk by men who havebeen in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet whohas not been in the moon is likely to be dull. we went to a cockpit in new orleans on a saturdayafternoon. i had never seen a cock-fight before. there were men andboys there of 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-fightinggoing on, you could have played the gathering on a stranger fora prayer-meeting; and after it began, for a revival--provided you blindfoldedyour 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 timewas called, they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked,caressed, poked toward

each other, and finally liberated. the bigblack cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on thehead with his spur. the gray responded with spirit. then the babelof many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased not thenceforth. whenthe cocks had been fighting some little time, i was expecting them momentlyto drop dead, for both were blind, red with blood, and so exhaustedthat they frequently fell down. yet they would not give up, neitherwould they die. the negro and the white man would pick them up every fewseconds, wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray, and taketheir heads in their mouths

and hold them there a moment--to warm backthe perishing life perhaps; i do not know. then, being set down again,the dying creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings,find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall exhaustedonce more. i did not see the end of the battle. i forcedmyself to endure it as long as i could, but it was too pitifula sight; so i made frank confession to that effect, and we retired.we heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring, and fightingto the last. evidently there is abundant fascination aboutthis 'sport' for such

as have had a degree of familiarity with it.i never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyedthis fight. the case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys often. they lost themselves in frenzies of delight. the 'cocking-main'is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question aboutthat; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sportthan fox-hunting--for the cocks like it; they experience, as well asconfer enjoyment; which is not the fox's case. we assisted--in the french sense--at a mulerace, one day. i believe i

enjoyed this contest more than any other mulethere. 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 withme. 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 obligedto use it a million times a day, if he have occasion to speakof respectable men and women that often; for he has no other phrase forsuch service except that

single one. he never tires of it; it alwayshas a fine sound to him. there is a kind of swell medieval bullinessand tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. if he hadbeen in palestine in the early times, we should have had no referencesto 'much people' out of him. no, he would have said 'the beauty andthe chivalry of galilee' assembled to hear the sermon on the mount.it is likely that the men and women of the south are sick enough ofthat phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is no immediateprospect 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 quoteda good letter, penned by a trained hand; but the average correspondenthurls a style which differs from that. for instance-- the 'times-democrat' sent a relief-steamerup one of the bayous, last april. this steamer landed at a village, upthere somewhere, and the captain invited some of the ladies of thevillage to make a short trip with him. they accepted and came aboard, andthe steamboat shoved out

up the creek. that was all there was 'to it.'and that is all that the editor of the 'times-democrat' would havegot out of it. there was nothing in the thing but statistics, and hewould have got nothing else out of it. he would probably have even tabulatedthem, partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partlyto save space. but his special correspondent knows other methodsof handling statistics. he just throws off all restraint and wallowsin them-- 'on saturday, early in the morning, the beautyof the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallantlittle boat glided up

the bayou.' twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboardand the boat shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of tengood 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 isplain, and sensible, and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight.then he goes all 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 nothing abouthandling a pen. on the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs, inhis long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it when thewomen are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint. for instance-- 'at 4 o'clock ominous clouds began to gatherin the south-east, and presently from the gulf there came a blowwhich increased in severity every moment. it was not safe to leave thelanding then, and there was a delay. the oaks shook off long tresses oftheir mossy beards to the tugging of the wind, and the bayou in itsambition put on miniature

waves in mocking of much larger bodies ofwater. a lull permitted a start, and homewards we steamed, an inky skyoverhead and a heavy wind blowing. as darkness crept on, there werefew on board who did not wish themselves nearer home.' there is nothing the matter with that. itis good description, compactly put. yet there was great temptation, there,to drop into lurid writing. but let us return to the mule. since i lefthim, i have rummaged around and found a full report of the race. in iti find confirmation of the theory which i broached just now--namely,that the trouble with the

southern reporter is women: women, supplementedby walter scott 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 whenthey intrude, we have this frantic result-- 'it will be probably a long time before theladies' stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as it did yesterday.the new orleans women are always charming, but never so much soas at this time of the year, when in their dainty spring costumes theybring with them a breath of 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 appreciated as henever did before the peri's feeling at the gates of paradise, and wonderedwhat was the priceless boon that would admit him to their sacredpresence. sparkling on their white-robed breasts or shoulders were thecolors of their favorite knights, and were it not for the fact thatthe doughty heroes appeared on unromantic mules, it would have been easyto imagine one of king 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 weresleek, some hadn't had their fur brushed lately; some were innocentlygay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness; guessingfrom looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war, somethought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion. andeach mule acted according to his convictions. the result was an absenceof harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety--varietyof a picturesque and entertaining sort.

all the riders were young gentlemen in fashionablesociety. if the reader has been wondering why it is that theladies of new orleans attend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, thething is explained now. it is a fashion-freak; all connected with itare people of fashion. it is great fun, and cordially liked. themule-race is one of the marked occasions of the year. it has brought somepretty fast mules to the front. one of these had to be ruled out, becausehe was so fast that he turned the thing into a one-mule contest,and robbed it of one of its best features--variety. but every now andthen somebody disguises him

with a new name and a new complexion, andrings him in again. the riders dress in full jockey costumes ofbright-colored silks, satins, and velvets. the thirteen mules got away in a body, aftera couple of false starts, and scampered off with prodigious spirit.as each mule and each rider had a distinct opinion of his own as to howthe race ought to be run, and which side of the track was best in certaincircumstances, and how often the track ought to be crossed, and whena collision ought to be accomplished, and when it ought to be avoided,these twenty-six

conflicting opinions created a most fantasticand picturesque confusion, and the resulting spectacle was killinglycomical. mile heat; time 2:22. eight of the thirteenmules 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 was the 'consolationrace for beaten mules,' which followed later; but the firstheat was the best in that respect. i think that much the most enjoyable of allraces is a steamboat race; but, next to that, i prefer the gay and joyousmule-rush. two red-hot

steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, strainingevery nerve--that is to say, every rivet in the boilers--quakingand shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam fromthe pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks,parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam--this is sportthat makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment. a horse-race ispretty tame and colorless in comparison. still, a horse-race might bewell enough, in its way, perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome falsestarts. but then, nobody is ever killed. at least, nobody wasever killed when i was at a

horse-race. they have been crippled, it istrue; but this is little to the purpose. chapter 46 enchantments and enchanters the largest annual event in new orleans isa something which we arrived too late to sample--the mardi-gras festivities.i saw the procession of the mystic crew of comus there, twenty-fouryears ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken andgolden paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for thatsingle night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs,monstrosities, and other

diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderfulsort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the streetin the light of 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 ifi remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following ofsubordinates is known to any outsider. all these people are gentlemen ofposition and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization;so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merelyfor romance's sake, and not

on account of the police. mardi-gras is of course a relic of the frenchand spanish occupation; but i judge that the religious feature hasbeen pretty well knocked out of it now. sir walter has got the advantageof the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. his medievalbusiness, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasantcreatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantasticinventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day,and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonishmen that the grace-line

between the worldly season and the holy oneis reached. this mardi-gras pageant was the exclusivepossession of new orleans until recently. but now it has spread to memphisand st. louis and baltimore. it has probably reached its limit.it is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical north; wouldcertainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would lastin london. for the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and thegrotesque. take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knightsand 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--wouldkill it in the north or in london. puck and punch, and thepress universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, andits first exhibition would be also its last. against the crimes of the french revolutionand of bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the revolutionbroke the chains of the ancien regime and of the church, and madeof a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and bonaparte institutedthe setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped thedivinity from royalty, that

whereas crowned heads in europe were godsbefore, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but onlyfigureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. such benefactionsas these compensate the temporary harm which bonaparte and therevolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great andpermanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. then comes sir walter scott with his enchantments,and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and eventurns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; withdecayed and swinish forms

of religion; with decayed and degraded systemsof government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs,sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanishedsociety. he did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm,perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. most of the worldhas now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all ofthem; but in our south they flourish pretty forcefully still. not so forcefullyas half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. there,the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century iscuriously confused and

commingled with the walter scott middle-agesham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressiveideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflatedspeech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd 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 sirwalter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in placeof modern and medieval mixed, and the south would be fully a generationfurther advanced than it is. it was sir walter that made every gentlemanin the south a major

or a colonel, or a general or a judge, beforethe war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value thesebogus decorations. for it was he that created rank and caste down there,and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasurein them. enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creationsand contributions of sir walter. sir walter had so large a hand in making southerncharacter, as it existed before the war, that he is in greatmeasure responsible for the war. it seems a little harsh toward adead man to say that we never

should have had any war but for sir walter;and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be madein support of that wild proposition. the southerner of the americanrevolution owned slaves; so did the southerner of the civil war: but theformer resembles the latter as an englishman resembles a frenchman. thechange 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, howdeeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. ifone take up a northern or

southern literary periodical of forty or fiftyyears 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 styleand methods, in fact. this sort of literature being the fashion in bothsections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition;and as a consequence, the south was able to show as many well-knownliterary 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 thenorth has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the southernwriter still clings to it--clings to it and has a restricted marketfor his wares, as a consequence. there is as much literary talentin the south, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gainbut slight currency under present conditions; the authors write forthe past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language.but when a southerner of genius writes modern english, his book goesupon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly allabout america and england,

and through the great english reprint publishinghouses of germany--as witness the experience of mr. cable and uncleremus, two of the very few southern authors who do not write in thesouthern style. instead of three or four widely-known literary names,the south ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when sirwalter's time is out. a curious exemplification of the power ofa single book for good 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 theother restored it. as far

as our south is concerned, the good work doneby cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has scott'spernicious work undermined it. chapter 47 uncle remus and mr. cable mr. joel chandler harris ('uncle remus') wasto arrive from atlanta at seven o'clock sunday morning; so we got upand received him. we were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivalsat the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of himwhich had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. he was said tobe undersized, red-haired,

and somewhat freckled. he was the only manin the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. hewas said to be very shy. he is a shy man. of this there is no doubt. itmay not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. after days of intimacyone wonders to see that it is still in about as strong forceas ever. there is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as allknow who have read the uncle remus book; and a fine genius, too, as allknow by 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 childrenwho had flocked eagerly to mr. cable's house to get a glimpse of theillustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. they said-- 'why, he 's white!' they were grieved about it. so, to consolethem, the book was brought, that they might hear uncle remus's tar-babystory from the lips of uncle remus himself--or what, in their outragedeyes, was left of him. but it turned out that he had never read aloud topeople, and was too shy to

venture the attempt now. mr. cable and i readfrom books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but hisimmortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so wehad to read about brer rabbit ourselves. mr. harris ought to be able to read the negrodialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writingit he is the only master the country has produced. mr. cable is the onlymaster in the writing of french dialects that the country has produced;and he reads them in perfection. it was a great treat to hearhim read 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 differentinstances mr. cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in hisbooks, next-to-impossible french names which nevertheless happened tobe borne by living and sensitive citizens of new orleans. his nameswere either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsoletepast, i do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of themturned up, and were a good

deal hurt at having attention directed tothemselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. mr. warner and i had an experience of thesame sort when we wrote the book called 'the gilded age.' there isa character in it called 'sellers.' i do not remember what his firstname was, in the beginning; but anyway, mr. warner did not like it, andwanted 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 saidthat away out west, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actuallyshaken hands with a man

bearing that impossible name--'eschol sellers.'he added-- 'it was twenty years ago; his name has probablycarried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never seethe book anyhow. we will confiscate his name. the name you are usingis 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 bookhad been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and mostaristocratic looking white

men that ever lived, called around, with themost formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief,we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote[figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. think it was more.]}copies of the book and change that name to 'mulberry sellers' infuture editions. chapter 48 sugar and postage one day, on the street, i encountered theman whom, of all men, i most wished to see--horace bixby; formerly pilotunder me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'cityof baton rouge,' the latest

and swiftest addition to the anchor line.the same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, thesame alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision ofhand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth,not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. it is acurious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at theend of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. i have nothad 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 severaldays for her, purposing to return to st. louis in her. the captainand i joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of major wood,and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-governorwarmouth's sugar plantation. strung along below the city, werea number of decayed, ram-shackly, superannuated old steamboats,not one of which had i ever seen before. they had all been built, andworn out, and thrown aside, since i was here last. this gives one a realizingsense of the frailness of a mississippi boat and the briefness ofits life.

six miles below town a fat and battered brickchimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed outas the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battleof 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 notyet reached new orleans. if we had had the cable telegraph in those days,this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have beenwasted; and better still, jackson would probably never have been president.we have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, butnot over some of those done us

by jackson's presidency. the warmouth plantation covers a vast dealof ground, and the hospitality of the warmouth mansion is graduatedto the same large scale. we saw steam-plows at work, here, forthe first time. the traction engine travels about on its own wheels,till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and bymeans of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundredyards across the field, between the rows of cane. the thing cuts downinto the black mold a foot and a half deep. the plow looks like a fore-and-aftbrace of a hudson

river steamer, inverted. when the negro steersmansits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, whilethe other sticks up high in air. this great see-saw goes rolling and pitchinglike a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that couldstay on it. the plantation contains two thousand six hundredacres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitfulorange grove of five thousand trees. the cane is cultivated after a modernand intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for meto attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. i forget the otherdetails. however, this year's

crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tonsof sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. these troublesomeand expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a halfand from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four timeswhat the yield of an acre was in my time. the drainage-ditches were everywhere alivewith little crabs--'fiddlers.' one saw them scamperingsidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. expensivepests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them.

the great sugar-house was a wilderness oftubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. theprocess of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. first, you heaveyour cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; thenrun it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; thenthrough the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifyingtanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipeto condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. it isnow ready for market. i have jotted these particulars down from memory.the thing looks simple and

easy. do not deceive yourself. to make sugaris really one of the most difficult things in the world. and tomake it right, is next to impossible. if you will examine your own supplyevery now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result,you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sandinto it. we could have gone down to the mouth of theriver and visited captain eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where theriver has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-sixfeet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of thewater everything would be

covered up and invisible. we could have visited that ancient and singularburg, 'pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so theysay; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, evento the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boysand girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are withthe velocipede. we could have done a number of other things;but on account of limited time, we went back home. the sail up the breezyand sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have beensatisfyingly sentimental

and romantic but for the interruptions ofthe tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery andthe guests were always this-worldly, and often profane. he had alsoa superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laughcommon 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 again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't givea damn for a tug-load of such rot.' romance and sentiment cannotlong survive this sort of

discouragement; so the singing and talkingpresently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himselfhoarse for joy. then the male members of the party moved tothe forecastle, to smoke and gossip. there were several old steamboatmenalong, and i learned from them a great deal of what had been happeningto my former river friends during my long absence. i learned that a pilotwhom i used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for morethan fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceasedrelative, through a new york spiritualist medium named manchester--postagegraduated by

distance: from the local post-office in paradiseto new york, five dollars; from new york to st. louis, threecents. i remember mr. manchester very well. i called on him once,ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquireafter a deceased uncle. this uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violentand unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him somethree miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet throughat the butt and sixty-five feet high. he did not survive thistriumph. at the seance just referred to, my friend questioned hislate uncle, through mr.

manchester, and the late uncle wrote downhis replies, using mr. manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose.the following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also ofthe sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by manchester underthe pretense that it came from the specter. if this man is not the paltriestfraud that lives, i owe him an apology-- 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 friendsleft behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. q. when your friends in the earth all getto the spirit land, what shall

you have to talk about then?--nothing butabout how happy you all are? no reply. it is explained that spirits willnot answer frivolous questions. q. how is it that spirits that are contentto spend an eternity in 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? q. you know my present way of life. can yousuggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonablyinsure 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 you been in

the spirit land? a. we have no measurements of time here. q. though you may be indifferent and uncertainas to dates and times in your present condition and environment, thishas nothing to do with your former condition. you had dates then. oneof these is what i ask for. you departed on a certain day in a certainyear. is not this true? q. then name the day of the month. (much fumbling with pencil, on the part ofthe medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head andbody, for some little time.

finally, explanation to the effect that spiritsoften forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) q. then this one has actually forgotten thedate of its translation to this was granted to be the case. q. this is very curious. well, then, whatyear was it? (more fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, onthe part of the medium. finally, explanation to the effect that thespirit has forgotten the year.) q. this is indeed stupendous. let me put onemore question, one last

question, to you, before we part to meet nomore;--for even if i fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there willgo for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgottenme and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut offby a catastrophe? a. (after long hesitation and many throesand spasms.) natural death. this ended the interview. my friend told themedium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowedwith an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory,and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keepsome shred of these for

his amusement in the realms of everlastingcontentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of thepopulation there. this man had plenty of clients--has plentyyet. he receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spiritworld, and delivers them all over this country through the united statesmail. these letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits'who don't know 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 teachinghow to contrive an

improved railway car-wheel. it is coarse employmentfor a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talkingfor ever about 'how happy we are.' chapter 49 episodes in pilot life in the course of the tug-boat gossip, it cameout that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river,four had chosen farming as an occupation. of course this was not becausethey were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likelyto succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for theirchoice must be traced to some

other source. doubtless they chose farmingbecause that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirablestrangers--like the pilot-house hermitage. and doubtless theyalso chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and dangerthey had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boatswung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and cozinessof such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come todream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing tolong for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy.

but i did not learn that any of these pilot-farmershad astonished anybody with their successes. their farmsdo not support them: they support their farms. the pilot-farmer disappearsfrom the river annually, about the breaking of spring, andis seen no more till next frost. then he appears again, in damaged homespun,combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berthfor the winter. in this way he pays the debts which his farming has achievedduring the agricultural season. so his river bondage is but half broken;he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year.

one of these men bought a farm, but did notretire to it. he knew a trick worth two of that. he did not proposeto pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to workingit. no, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to beworked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have twoand the pilot the third. but at the end of the season the pilot receivedno corn. the expert explained that his share was not reached.the farm produced only two loads. some of the pilots whom i had known had hadadventures--the outcome

fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases.captain montgomery, whom i had steered for when he was a pilot, commandedthe confederate fleet in the great battle before memphis; when hisvessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad ofsoldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. he was always a cool man;nothing could disturb his serenity. once when he was captain ofthe 'crescent city,' i was bringing the boat into port at new orleans,and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but receivednone. i had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibilityceased. it was

evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat wasperched upon the big bell, and i supposed the intellectual end of thecaptain was in it, but such was not the case. the captain was very strict;therefore i knew better than to touch a bell without orders. my dutywas to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leavethe consequences to take care of themselves--which i did. so we wentplowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--thecrash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged;for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... things were becomingexceedingly nervous and

uncomfortable. it seemed to me that the captainwas not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. but he did.just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he steppedout on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'set her back on both'--whichi did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we wentsmashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigiousracket. the captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards,except to remark that i had done right, and that he hoped iwould not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances.

one of the pilots whom i had known when iwas on the river had died a very honorable death. his boat caught fire,and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. then he wentout over the breast-board with his clothing in flames, and was the lastperson to get ashore. he died from his injuries in the course of twoor three hours, and his was the only life lost. the history of mississippi piloting affordssix or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundredinstances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or twoof being fatally too late;

but there is no instance of a pilot desertinghis post to save his life while by remaining and sacrificing it he mightsecure other lives from destruction. it is well worth while to setdown this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. the 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despiseall perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sortof death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibilityof his being useful in it. and so effectively are these admonitionsinculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be dependedupon to stick to the

wheel, and die there when occasion requires.in a memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at thewheel a great many years ago, in white river, to save the lives of othermen. he said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reacha sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to landagainst the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of manylives. he reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; butby that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping throughthem he was fatally burned. he had been urged to fly sooner, but had repliedas became a pilot to

reply-- 'i will not go. if i go, nobody will be saved;if i stay, no one will be lost but me. i will stay.' there were two hundred persons on board, andno life was lost but the pilot's. there used to be a monument to thisyoung fellow, in that memphis graveyard. while we tarried in memphison our down trip, i started out to look for it, but our time wasso brief that i was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. the tug-boat gossip informed me that dickkennet was dead--blown up,

near memphis, and killed; that several otherswhom i had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shotdown at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom ihad steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in new orleans,one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of thecity, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river,it was thought; that ben thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild'cub' whom i used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. aheedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief.an arkansas passenger

brought an enormous bear aboard, one day,and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. thornburgh's 'cub'could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'seewhat he would do.' he was promptly gratified. the bear chased him aroundand around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eagerfaces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatchedoff the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. the off-watchturned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. he presentlygrew lonesome, and started out for recreation. he ranged thewhole boat--visited every part

of it, with an advance guard of fleeing peoplein front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when hisowner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere;everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. i was told that one of my pilot friends felldead at the wheel, from heart disease, in 1869. the captain was onthe roof at the time. he saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted,and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. mr. bixby had been blown up, in madrid bend;was not injured, but the

other pilot was lost. george ritchie had been blown up near memphis--blowninto the river from the wheel, and disabled. the water was verycold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated untilnearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who wereon a piece of the wreck. they tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton,and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to memphis.he is one of bixby's pilots on the 'baton rouge' now. into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead,had dropped a bit of

romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romancenevertheless. when i knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift,boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and prettyconspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and cometo nothing. in a western city lived a rich and childless old foreignerand his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend,sort of servant. the young clerk of whom i have been speaking--whosename was not george johnson, but who shall be called george johnsonfor the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this younggirl, and they sinned; and

the old foreigner found them out, and rebukedthem. being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that theyhad been privately married. then the old foreigner's hurt was healed,and he forgave and blessed them. after that, they were able to continuetheir sin without concealment. by-and-bye the foreigner's wifedied; and presently he followed after her. friends of the familyassembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. thewill was opened and solemnly read. it bequeathed every penny of that oldman's great wealth to mrs. george johnson!

and there was no such person. the young sinnersfled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves beforean obscure justice of the peace, and got him to antedate the thing.that did no sort of good. the distant relatives flocked in and exposedthe fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, andcarried off the fortune, leaving the johnsons very legitimately, andlegally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, butwith not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. such are the actualfacts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation.

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