 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPE by Mark Twain Chapter 40 CASELS AND CULTURE Baton Rouge was closed in flowers like a bride. No much more so, like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute south now, no modifications, no compromises, no halfway measures. The magnolia trees and the capital grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense, rich foliage and huge snowball blossoms. The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom blossoms. They might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly in the south at last, for here the sugar region begins and the plantations, vast green levels, with sugar mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance, were in view. And there was a tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air. And at this point also begins the pilot's paradise, a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, soyers, or wrecks in his road. Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the capital building, for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad a couple of generations ago with his medieval romances. The south has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque chivalry doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton factories and locomotives. And traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough that a whitewashed castle with turrets and things, materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not, should ever have been built in this otherwise honourable place. But it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration money to the building of something genuine. Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the Female Institute of Columbia, Tennessee. The following remark is from the same advertisement. The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with its towers and 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 doubtless, harmless, and well enough, but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of Maudlin middle-age romanticism here in the midst of the plainest, and sturdiest, and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake. Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky female college. Female college sounds well enough, but since the phrasing it in that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems to me that she college would have been still better, because shorter, and means the same thing, that is, if either phrase means anything at all. The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by sentiment. The teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south. Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety. Hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and solicit southern patronage. Footnote, illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser. Still Tennessee, October 19. This morning, a few minutes after ten o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry, Jr. were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to kill him. This was at the fairgrounds, and O'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 was armed and O'Connor was not. The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the 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 another gentleman walking down Gay Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the bank, got a shotgun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired. Mabry fell dead, being shot on 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 shotgun. About this time Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., son of General Mabry, came rushing down the street unseen by O'Connor until within forty feet when the young 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'Connor turned and fired, the load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side. Mabry fell pierced with twenty buck shot and almost instantly O'Connor fell dead without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise but fell back dead. The whole tragedy occurred within two minutes and neither of the three spoke after he was shot. General Mabry had about thirty buck shot in his body. A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buck shot and another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had their clothing pierced by buck shot. The affair caused great excitement and Gay Street was thronged with thousands of people. General Mabry and his son Joe were acquitted only a few days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don Lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. Will Mabry was killed by Don Lusby last Christmas. Major Thomas O'Connor was president of the Mechanics National Bank here and was the wealthiest man in the state. Associated Press, Telegram. One day last month Professor Sharpe of Somerville, Tennessee, female college, a quiet and gentlemanly man, was told that his brother-in-law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him. Burton, it seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife into another. The Professor armed himself with a double-barreled shotgun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. The Memphis Avalanche reports that the Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community, knowing that the law was powerless in the actual condition of public sentiment to protect him, he protected himself. About the same time two young men in North Carolina quarreled about a girl and hostile messages were exchanged. Friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains. On the twenty-fourth, the young man met in the public highway. One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the other an ax. The man with a club fought desperately for his life, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blow sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead man. About the same time two highly connected young Virginians, clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while sky-larking came to blows. Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Rhodes' eyes. Rhodes demanded an apology. Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose. The parties had no pistols, and it was too late at night to procure them. One of them suggested that butcher knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion. The result was that Rhodes fell to 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 expressed deep regret, and we are told by a staunt and correspondent of the Philadelphia Press that every effort has been made to hush the matter up. Extracts from the public journals. What! Water-ho! The man that can blow so complacent a blast as that probably blows it from a castle. From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the Great Sugar Plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest walls of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely no longer, plenty of dwellings all the way on both banks, standing so close together for long distances that the broad river lying between the two rows becomes a sort of spacious street. A most home-like and happy-looking region. And now and then you see a pillard and porticoed great manor-house embowered in trees. Here is testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago. Mrs. Trollop says, The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans. But the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble illyx, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them. Captain Basil Hall. The district of country, which lies adjacent to the Mississippi in the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar-planters whose showy houses, gay Piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous slave villages all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery. All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears today, except as to the trigness of the houses. The whitewash is gone from the Negro cabins now, and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed neglected look. It is the blight of the war. Twenty-one years 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 them with stupid and silly lies and then laughed at them for believing in printing the same. They told Mrs. Trollop that the alligators, or crocodiles as she calls them, were terrible creatures, and backed up the statement with a blood-curling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night and ate up a woman and five children. The woman by herself would have satisfied any ordinarily impossible alligator, but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides. One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive, but they were. It is difficult at this day to understand and impossible to justify the reception which the book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning, so Basil Hall got. The approaches to New Orleans were familiar. General aspects were unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight. Similarly, in High River Stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levy rim. The flat country behind it lies low, planting the bottom of a dish, and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction. The old brick-salt warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city looked as they had always looked. Warehouses which had had a kind of Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them. For when the war broke out, the proprietor went to bed one night, leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the price of the article. The vast reach of plank-warves remained unchanged, and there were as many ships as ever, but the long array of steamboats had vanished. Not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left. The city itself had not changed into the eye. It had greatly increased in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets. The deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curb-stones were still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface. The sidewalks were still, in the sugar and bacon region, encumbered by casks and barrels and hogs-heads. The great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as dusty-looking as ever. Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying street-cars, and, toward evening, its broad second story verandas, crowded with gentlemen and ladies closed according to the latest mode. Not that there is any architecture in Canal Street, to speak in broad general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far-seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million habitants, but it is true. There is a huge, granite U.S. custom house, costly enough, genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like a state prison, but it was built before the war. Architecture in America may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck, and, in a sense, the bad luck, should have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the burnt district by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago. The burnt district of Boston was commonplace before the fire, but now there is no commercial district in any city in the world that can surpass it, or perhaps even rival it in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness. However, New Orleans has begun, just this moment, as one may say. When completed, the new cotton exchange will be a stately and beautiful building, massive and substantial, full of architectural graces, no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city it will be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has been lacking hitherto was a model to build toward, something to educate I and taste, a Suggester, so to speak. The city is well outfitted with progressive men, thinking sagacious, long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city and the city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep. Apparently there is a boom in everything but that one dead feature. The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent disease breeder. But the gutters are flushed now, two or three times a day, by powerful machinery. In many of the gutters the water never stands still, but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have been made, and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be during the long intervals between occasional yellow fever assaults, one of the healthiest cities in the Union. There is plenty of ice now for everybody manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially, and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our visit, it was the best-lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking. The New Orleans electric lights were of more numerous than those of New York, and very much better. The Union had this modified noon-day, not only in Canal and some neighbouring chief streets, but all along a stretch of five miles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city now, several of them, but recently organised, and inviting modern-style pleasure resorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is everywhere. One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The newspapers, as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they are. Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news, let it cost what it may. The editorial work is not hack grinding, but literature. As an example of New Orleans' journalistic achievement, it may be mentioned that the Times Democrat of August 26, 1882, contained a report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley, from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul, two thousand miles. That issue of the paper consisted of forty pages, seven columns to the page, two hundred and eighty columns in all, fifteen hundred words to the column, an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say, not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book. One may, with sorrow, contrast this, with the architecture of New Orleans. I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domestic article in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains, as it always was. All the dwellings are of wood, in the American part of the town, I mean, and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious, painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions stand in the center of large grounds, and rise garlanded with roses, out of the mists of swelling masses of shining green foliage, and many colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking. One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently. This is a mighty cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which is propped against the house corner on stilts. There is a mansion and brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very incongruous at first, but the people cannot have wells, and so they take rainwater. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves. Footnote. The Israelites are buried in graves by permission, I take it, not requirement, but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves, the town being built upon maid ground, so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others. CHAPTER 42 They bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses, sometimes to temples, are built of marble generally, are architecturally graceful and shapely. They face the walks and driveways of the cemetery, and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them, and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase City of the Dead has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee, or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it. And besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults, placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrance, sir, in the coarse and ugly but indestructible immortelle, which is a wreath or cross or some such emblem made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars. Kind of sorrowful breastpin, so to say. The mortelle requires no attention. You just hang it up, and there you are. Just leave it alone. It will take 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, graceful as of legged reptiles, creep along the marble fronts of the vaults and catch flies. Their changes of color, as to variety, are not up to the creature's reputation. They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle. But that is nothing. Any right-feeling reptile would do that. I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground to glut the earth and the plant roots and the air with disease germs five or fifty or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time. But they are hardly justifiable now when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen. But it is merest matter of course that these same relics within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial made several thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle performances are simply compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay for a saint, it is true, but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years and outlawed by the statute of limitations than not paid at all. And most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where you find one that pays, like St. Anne, you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute. And none of them pay any more than the principle of what they owe. They pay none of the interest, either simple or compound. A saint can never quite return the principle, however, for his dead body kills people, whereas his relics heal only. They never restore the dead to life. That part of the count is always left unsettled. Dr. F. Julius Lemoine, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote, The inhumation of human bodies dead from infectious diseases results in constantly loading the atmosphere and polluting the waters with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the specific germs of the diseases from which death resulted. The gases from buried corpses will rise to the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal gas will do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape. During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853 Dr. E. H. Barton reported that in the fourth district the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two per thousand, more than double that of any other. In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease. In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where three hundred years previously the victims of the pestilence had been buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial grounds at Ayam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease. North American review number three, volume 135. In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead. One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in the United States than the government expends for public school purposes. Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year and give each bankrupt a capital of eight thousand six hundred and thirty dollars with which to resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880. These figures do not include the sums invested in burial grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of the cemeteries. For the rich cremation would answer as well as burial, for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious as a Hindu suti. While for the poor cremation would be better than burial because so cheap. Footnote, four or five dollars is the minimum cost. So cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by and by. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial withusisms. But on the other hand it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation jokes that have had a rest for two thousand years. I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars 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 of the twelve months debtless. To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child. He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find. Plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost less than four, probably if it had been built to put something useful into it. He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months. CHAPTER 43 THE ART OF INHUMATION About the same time I encountered a man in the street whom I had not seen for six or seven years, and something like this talk followed. I said, But you used to look sad and oldish. You don't now. Where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? Give me the address. He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on it, and went on chuckling while I read, J.B. Untertaker. Then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to Lorde, and cried out, That's what's the matter! It used to be rough times with me when you knew me, insurance agency business, you know, mighty regular! Big fire all right! brisk trade for ten days while people scared. After that, dull policy business till next fire. Town like this don't have fires often enough. A fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that he gets discouraged. But you bet you this is the business. People don't wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop off 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 hired hearse, and now look at the thing. I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man. Don't care who he is. Five years ago lodged in an attic. Live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all of the modern inconveniences. Does a coffin pay so well? Is there much profit on a coffin? Go away! How you talk! Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of the voice and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm. Look here. There's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't ever try to Jew you down. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't say. I'll look around a little, and if I find I can't do better, I'll come back and take it. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person won't take in pine if he can go walnut, and won't take in walnut if he can go mahogany, and won't take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door plate and bronze handles. That's a coffin. And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that's a coffin. You're taking? Why, it's the dead surest business in Christendom and the nobbiest. Why, just look at it. A rich man won't have anything but your very best. And you can just pile it on too. Pile it on and sock it to him. He won't even holler. And you take in a poor man, and if you work him right, he'll bust himself on a single layout, or especially a woman. For instance, Mrs. O'Flaherty comes in, widow, wiping her eyes and kind of moaning. Unhankerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock, and says, And what might ye ask for that one? Thirty-nine dollars, madam, says I. It's a fine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried like a gentleman, as he was. If I have to work me fingers off for it, I'll have that one sore. Yes, madam, says I. And it is a very good one, too, not costly to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garments to our clothes, as the saying is. And as she starts out I heave in kind of casually. This one, with the white satin lining, is a beauty. But I am afraid—well, sixty-five dollars is a rather—rather—but no matter. I felt obliged to say to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, Do you mind to sigh that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mite to that joe well box to ship that drunken, divvled purgatory in? Yes, madam. Then Pat shall go to heaven and the twin to it, if it takes the last, wrap the O'Flaherty's can raise, and mourn you, stick on some extras, too, and I'll give you 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-four dollars' worth of hacks, and flung as much style into Dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin. And, of course, she sails in and goes the O'Shaughnessy about four hacks, and an omnibus better. That used to be, but that's all played now, that is, in this particular town. The Irish got to piling up hacks, so, on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry for two years afterward, so the priest pitched in and broke it all up. He don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one. Well, I said, if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times, what must you be in an epidemic? He shook his head. No, you're off there. We don't like to see an epidemic. An epidemic don't pay. Well, of course I don't mean that exactly, but it don't pay in proportion to the regular thing. Don't it occur to you why? No. Think. I can't imagine. What is it? It's just two things. Well, what are they? One's embalming. What's the other? Ice. How is that? Well, in ordinary times a person dies and we lay him up in ice. One day, two days, maybe three to wait for friends to come. Takes a lot of it, melts fast. We charge jewelry rates for that ice, and war prices for attendance. Well, don't you know, when there's an epidemic, they rush him to the cemetery the minute the breath's out. No market for ice in an epidemic. Same with embalming. You take a family that's able to embalm, and you've got a soft thing. You can mention 16 different ways to do it, though there ain't only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts of it, and they'll take the highest priced way every time. It's human nature. Human nature in grief. It don't reason, you see. Time being, it don't care damn. All it wants is physical immortality for deceased, and they're willing to pay for it. All you've got to do is to just be calm and stack it up. They'll stand the racket. Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't give away, and get your embalming traps round you and go to work. And in a couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred. That's what he's worth. There ain't anything equal to it but trading rats for diamonds in time of famine. Well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to embalm. No, indeed they don't. And it hurts the business like hell. As we say, hurts it like hell. Health. See? Our little joke in the trade. Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any. I mean, when you're going by sometime. In his joyful high spirits he did the exaggerating himself, if any has been done. I have not enlarged on him. With the above brief reference to inhumation let us leave the subject. As for me I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once, who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner. I wouldn't worry about that if I had your chances. Much he knew about it. The family also opposed to it. CHAPTER 44 CITY SITES The old French part of New Orleans, anciently the Spanish part, bears no resemblance to the American end of the city, the American end which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center. The houses are masked in blocks, are austerely plain and dignified, uniform of pattern, with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect. All are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, very-coloured stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated. Neither is it to be found elsewhere in America. The iron railings are a specialty also. The pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful, with a large cipher or monogram in the centre, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate forms wrought in steel. The ancient railings are handmade, and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable. They are become bric-a-brac. The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the south's finest literary genius, the author of The Grand Bissems. In him the south has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. In truth I find by experience that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it and learn of it and judge of it more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it. With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure, and you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things, vivid and yet fitful and darkling. You glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination. A case, as it were, of ignorant, nearsighted stranger traversing the rim of wide, vague horizons of alps with an inspired and enlightened, long-sighted native. We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices. There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it, but one can say of it, as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact. It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy of Music, but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles, the fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had the right kind of agricultural head of the establishment. We visited also the Venerable Cathedral, and the Pretty Square in front of it, the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort, and lovely with orange trees and blossomy shrubs. Then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses, and out on to the wide dead level beyond where the villas are, and the water-wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous with cows and children, passing by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate, but we took him on trust and did not visit him. He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history, and as long as he preserved unspotted in retirement the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage, and reverence were his from high and low, but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public shook him and turned aside and wept. When he died they set up a monument over him, and little by little he has come into respect again, but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. Today the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget what he became. Once we drove a few miles across the swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other, and here and there in the distance a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint a form as the apple trees in Japanese pictures. Such was our course and the surroundings of it. There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite. And by and by we reached the West End, a collection of hotels of the usual light summer resort pattern, with broad verandas all around, and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds. We had dinner on a ground veranda over the water, the chief dish, the renowned fish called the Pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and to Spanish Fort every evening and dine, listen to the bands, take strolls in the open air under the electric lights, go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways. We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the Pompano, notably at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city. He was in his last possible perfection there and justified his fame. In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet crayfish, 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 Buckingham Palace. Those I have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose. In the West and South they have a new institution, the Broom Brigade. It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume and go through the infantry drill with broom in place of musket. It is a very pretty sight on private view. When they perform on the stage of a theater in the blaze of colored fires it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle. I saw them go through their complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision. I saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom except sweep. I did not see them sweep, but I know they could learn. What they have already learned proves that. And if they ever should learn, and go on the war-path down Chupitoulas or some of the other streets around there, those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes. But the girls themselves wouldn't, so nothing would be really gained after all. The drill was in the Washington Artillery Building. In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war. Also a fine oil painting representing Stonewall Jackson's last interview with General Lee. Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable on account of the portraits, which are authentic. But like many another historical picture it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another. Last interview between Lee and Jackson. Jackson introducing himself to Lee. Jackson accepting Lee's invitation to dinner. Jackson declining Lee's invitation to dinner with thanks. Jackson apologizing for a heavy defeat. Jackson reporting a great victory. Jackson asking Lee for a match. It tells one story and a sufficient one, for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, here are Lee and Jackson together. The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's last interview if he could have done it. But he couldn't, for there wasn't any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth for information a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome people with fine sympathetic nature stand up and weep in front of the celebrated Beatrice Chenchi the day before her execution. It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture they would inspect it unmoved and say, young girl with hay fever, young girl with her head in a bag. I found the half-forgotten southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A southerner talks music, at least at his music to me, but then I was born in the south. The educated southerner has no use for an R except at the beginning of a word. He says, Anna and Dina and Govna and before the wall and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the R disappear from southern speech and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the north, nor inherited from England. Many southerners, most southerners, put a Y into occasional words that begin with the K sound. For instance, they say, Mr. Chiata, Carter, and speak of playing chiads or of writing in the chias, and they have the pleasant custom, long ago fallen into decay in the north, of frequently employing the respectful sir. Instead of the curt yes and the abrupt no, they say yes-ah, no-sah. But there are some infelicities such as like for as, and the addition of an at where it isn't needed. I heard an educated gentleman say, like the flag-officer did. His cook or his butler would have said, like the flag-officer done. You hear gentlemen say, where have you been at? And here is the aggravated form. Heard a ragged street-harib say it to a comrade, I was a askin' tom what you was a sentin' 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 from England, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee original, is but little used among Southerners. They say reckon. They haven't any dozen't in their language. They say don't instead. The unpolished often use went, for gone. It is nearly as bad as the northern hadn't ought. This reminds me 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, combined in this half-breeds architecture without inquiring. One parent northern, the other southern. Today I heard a schoolmistress ask, where is John gone? This form is so common, so nearly universal, in fact, that if she had used wither instead of where, I think it would have sounded like an affectation. We picked up one excellent word, a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get, a nice limber, expressive handy word, lanyap. They pronounce it lanyap. It is Spanish, so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day. Heard twenty people use it, the second, inquired what it meant, the third, adopted it, and got facility in swinging it in the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a baker's dozen. It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city when a child or a servant buys something in a shop, or even the mayor, or the governor, for all I know, he finishes the operation by saying, give me something for lanyap. The shopman always responds, gives the child a bit of liquorous root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor, and I don't know what he gives the governor, support likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans, and you say, what, again? No, I've had enough. The other party says, but just this one time more. This is for lanyap. When the bow perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and seized by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his, I beg pardon, no harm intended, into the briefer form of, oh, that's for lanyap. If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says, for lanyap, sir, and gets you another cup without extra charge. End of Chapter 44 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. 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 of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen today, it can easily happen that four of them and possibly five were not in the field at all. So the chances are, four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation, and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic, it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up. The case is very different in the South. There every man you meet was in the war, and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in 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 is what A.D. is elsewhere. They date from it. All day long you hear things placed as having happened since the war, or doing the war, or before the war, or right after the war, or about two years, or five years, or ten years, before the war, or after the war. It shows how intimately every individual was visited in his own person by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside. At a club one evening a gentleman turned to me and said in an aside, You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war. It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us. And there is another reason. In the war each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled all the different varieties of human experience. As a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort, but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war, and out he comes with it. Of course, that brings the talk back to the war. You may try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house, and we may all join in and help, but there can be but one result. The most random topic would load every man up with war reminiscences, and shut him up too, and talk would be likely to stop presently, because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you've got a crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burning to fetch out. The poet was sitting some little distance away, and presently he began to speak about the moon. The gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an aside, There, the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but you will see that it will suggest something to somebody about the war in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved. The poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surprise to him, had had the impression that down here toward the equator, the moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up north, had had the impression that when he visited New Orleans many years ago, the moon, interruption from the other end of the room, let me explain that, reminds me of an anecdote. Everything has changed since the war, for better or for worse, but you'll find people down here born grumblers who see no change except the change for the worse. There was an old negro woman of this sort, a young New Yorker said in her presence, What a wonderful moon you have down here. She sighed and said, Ah, bless your heart, honey, you ought to see that moon for the wall. The new topic was dead already, but the poet resurrected it and gave it a new start. A brief dispute followed as to whether the difference between northern and southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined. Moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificial methods of dispelling darkness. Then somebody remembered that when Farragut advanced upon Port Hudson on a dark night and did not wish to assist the aim of the Confederate gunners, he carried no battle lanterns, but painted the decks of his ship white and thus created a dim but valuable light which enabled his own men to grope their way around with considerable facility. At this point the war got the floor again, the ten minutes not quite up yet. I was not sorry for war-talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting, whereas moon-talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull. We went to a cockpit in New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon. I had never seen a cock-fight before. There were men and boys 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-fighting going on you could have played the gathering on a stranger for a prayer-meeting, and after it began, for a revival provided you blindfolded your stranger, for the shouting was something prodigious. A negro and a white man were in the ring, everybody else outside. The cocks were brought in in sacks, and when time was called they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated. The big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on the head with his spur. The gray responded with spirit. Then the babble of many tongue-shoutings broke out and ceased not thenceforth. When the cocks had been fighting some little time, I was expecting them momentarily to drop dead, for both were blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down. Yet they would not give up, neither would they die. The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds, wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray, and take their heads in their mouths, and hold them there a moment, to warm back the 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 exhausted once more. I did not see the end of the battle. I forced myself to endure it as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight, so I made frank confession to that effect, and we retired. We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring, and fighting to the last. Evidently there is abundant fascination about this sport, for such as have had a degree of familiarity with it. I never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. The case was the same with old grey heads, and with boys of ten. They lost themselves in frenzies of delight. The cocking mane is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that. Still it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox hunting, for the cocks like it. They experience as well as confer enjoyment, which is not the fox's case. We assisted, in the French sense, out of mule race one day. I believe I enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there. I enjoyed it more than I remember having enjoyed any other animal race I ever saw. The grandstand was well filled with the beauty and the chivalry of New Orleans. That phrase is not original with me. It is the southern reporters. He has used it for two generations. He uses it twenty times a day, or twenty thousand times a day, or a million times a day, according to the exigencies. He is obliged to use it a million times a day if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often, for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one. He never tires of it. It always has a fine sound to him. There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. If he had been in Palestine in the early times, we should have had no references to much people out of him. No, he would have said, the beauty and the 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 of that phrase by this time and would like a change, but there is no immediate prospect of there getting it. The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style, wastes no words, and does not gush, not so with his average correspondent. In the appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand, but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that. For instance, the Times Democrats sent a relief steamer up one of the bayous last April. This steamer landed at a village up there somewhere, and the captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him. They accepted and came aboard. The 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 have got out of it. There was nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it. He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space. But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics. He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them. On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight, the gallant little boat glided up the bayou. Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard, and the boat shoved out up the creek. There's a clean waste of ten good words, and is also destructive of compactness of statement. The trouble with the southern reporter is women. They unsettle him. They throw him off his balance. He is plain and sensible and satisfactory until a woman heaves in sight. Then he goes all to pieces. His mind totters. He becomes flowery and idiotic. From reading the above extract you would imagine that this student of Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice and knows next to nothing about handling a pen. On the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs in his long letter that he knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give him the artificial flower complaint. For instance, at four o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the southeast, and presently from the gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment. It was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was a delay. The oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the tugging of the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature waves in mocking of much larger bodies of water. A lull permitted a start and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind blowing. As darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wish themselves nearer home. There is nothing wrong with that. It is good description compactly put. Yet there was great temptation there to drop into lurid writing. But let us return to the mule. Since I left him I have rummaged around and found a full report of the race. In it I find confirmation of the theory which I broached just now, namely that the trouble with the southern reporter is women. Women supplemented by 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 when they intrude we have this frantic result. It will be probably a long time before the Lady Stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as it did yesterday. The New Orleans women are always charming, but never so much so as at this time of the year, when in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breath of balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable. The stand was so crowded with them that, walking at their feet and seeing no possibility of approach, many a man appreciated as he never did before the parries feeling at the gates of paradise and wondered what was the priceless boon that would admit him to their sacred presence. Sparkling on their white-robed breasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite knights and were it not for the fact that the doughy heroes appeared on unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one of King Arthur's Galadays. There were thirteen mules in the first heat, all sorts of mules they were, all sorts of complexions, gates, dispositions, aspects. Some were handsome creatures, some were not, some were sleek, some hadn't had their fur brushed lately, some were innocently gay and frisky, some were full of malice and all unrighteousness. Guessing from looks some of them thought the matter on hand was war, some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion, and each mule acted according to his convictions. The result was an absence of harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety, variety of a picturesque and entertaining sort. All the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society. If the reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of New Orleans attend so humble and orgy as a mule race, the thing is explained now. It is a fashion freak, all connected with it are people of fashion. It is great fun and cordially liked. The mule race is one of the marked occasions of the year. It has brought some pretty fast mules to the front. One of these had to be ruled out because he was so fast that he turned the thing into a one-mule contest and robbed it of one of its best features, variety. But every now and then somebody disguises him with a new name and a new complexion and rings him in again. The riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks, satins, and velvets. The thirteen mules got away in a body after a 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 how the race ought to be run and which side of the track was best in certain circumstances and how often the track ought to be crossed and when a collision ought to be accomplished and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six conflicting opinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical. Mile heat, time, two minutes twenty-two seconds, eight of the thirteen mules distanced. I had a bet on a mule which would have won if the procession had been reversed. The second heat was good fun and so was the consolation race for beaten mules which followed later, but the first heat was the best in that respect. I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race, but next to that I prefer the gay and joyous mule rush. Two red-hot steamboats raging along neck and neck, straining every nerve, that is to say every rivet in the boilers, quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam. This is sport that makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment. A horse race is pretty tame and colorless in comparison. Still, a horse race might be well enough in its way, perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts. But then nobody is ever killed. At least nobody was ever killed when I was at a horse race. They have been crippled, it is true, but this is little to the purpose. CHAPTER 46 ENCHANTMENTS AND ENCHANTERS The largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrive too late to sample—the Mardi Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the mystic crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago, with knights and nobles and so on, closed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single knight's use, and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquery—a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches. But it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor and variety. There is a chief personage, Rex, and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence, and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization, so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake and not on account of the police. Mardi Gras is, of course, a relic of the French and Spanish occupation, but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl in Rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from Fairyland, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. This Mardi Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently, but now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical north, which certainly lasts but a very brief time, as it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny, and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi Gras would die, down there in the south. The very feature that keeps it alive in the south, girly-girly romance, would kill it in the north or in London. Puck and punch and the press universal would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set to compensating benefactions. The Revolution broke the chains of the ancien régime and of the church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of free men, and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent 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 even turns it back, sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms, with decayed and swinish forms of religion, with decayed and degraded systems of government, with a silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gods, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long vanished society. He did measureless harm, more real and lasting harm perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them, but in our south they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age Sham civilization. And so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works mixed up with the dual, the inflated speech, and a jujune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter Scott disease the character of the Southerner, or Southeren, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it, would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the south would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the south a major, or a colonel, or a general, or a judge, before the war, and it was he also that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter, and yet something of a plausible argument might perhaps be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves, so did the Southerner of the Civil War, but the former resembles the latter, as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated and how strongly it holds. If one take up a northern or southern literary periodical of 40 or 50 years ago he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery eloquence, romanticism, sentimentality all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done too, innocent travesties of his style and methods in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition, and as a consequence the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportion to population, as the North could. But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South, for the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it, clings to it, and has a restricted market for his wares as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South now as ever there was, of course, but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions. The authors write for the past, not the present. They use obsolete forms and a dead language. But when a Southerner of Genius writes modern English his book goes upon crutches no longer but upon wings. And they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany, as witnessed the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two, and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. A curious exemplification of the power of a 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's admiration for the medieval chivalry silliness out of existence, and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it. Mr. Joel Chandler, Harris, Uncle Remus, was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o'clock Sunday morning, so he got up and received him. We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the Hotel Counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. He was the only man in the party who's outside tallied with this Bill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book, and a fine genius too, as all know 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 children who had flocked eagerly to see Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. They said, Why, he's white! They were grieved about it. So to console them the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus' tar-baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself, or what in their outraged eyes was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people and was too shy to venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours to show him what an easy trick it was. But his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Bear Rabbit ourselves. Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the Negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced, and he reads them in perfection. It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean Apuclain and about Inerarity and his famous pig show, representing Louisiana to Hunter the Union, along with passages of nicely shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. It came out in conversation that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next to impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be born by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past. I do not now remember which, but at any rate living bearers of them turned up and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called The Gilded Age. There is a character in it called Sellers. I do not remember what his first name was in the beginning, but anyway Mr. Warner did not like it and wanted it improved. He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named Echel Sellers. Of course I said I could not without stimulants. He said that away out west once he had met and contemplated and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name Echel Sellers. He added, It was twenty years ago. His name has probably carried him off before this and if it hasn't he will never see the book anyhow. We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common and therefore dangerous. There are probably a thousand sellers bearing it and the whole horde will come after us. But Echel Sellers is a safe name. It is a rock. So we borrowed that name and when the book had been out about a week one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived called around, with the most 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. I think it was more. Ten million copies of the book and change that name to Mulberry Sellers in future editions. End of Chapter 47 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Chapter 48 Sugar and Postage One day on the street I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most wish to see, Horace Bixby, formerly pilot under me or rather over me, now captain of the great steamer, City of Baton Rouge, the latest and swiftest addition to the anchor line. The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, 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 a curious thing to leave a man thirty-five years old and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe. There were some crows' feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, proposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and 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-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along below the city were a number of decayed, ramshackly, superannuated old steam-boats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built and worn out and thrown aside since I was here last. This gives one a realising sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. Six miles below town, a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended. The two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt. Those lives would not have been wasted. And better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the War of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency. The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth Mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam plows at work here for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels till it reaches the required post. Then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow towards itself two or three hundred yards across the field between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mould a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a four-and-aft brace of a Hudson River steamer inverted. When the Negro Steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great seesaw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres, six hundred and fifty are in cane, and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion to elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe, but it lost forty thousand dollars last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar. Consequently, last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half, and from that to two tons to the acre, which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. The drainage ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs, fiddlers. One saw them scampering sideways in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests these crabs, for they bore into the levees and ruin them. The Great Sugar House was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice. Then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber. Then through the bone filter to remove the alcohol. Then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses. Then through the granulating pipe to condense it. Then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every 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 sand into it. We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Ead's great work, the Jetty's, where the river has been compressed between walls and thus deepened to twenty-six feet. But it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, Pilot Town, which stands on stilts in the water, so they say, where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals, and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with a velocipede. We could have done a number of other things, but on account of limited time we went back home. The sail up to Breezy and Sparkling River was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this worldly and often profane. He had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting metallic laugh common to his breed, a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh with the soul left out of it. He applied it to every sentimental remark and to every pathetic song. He cackled it out with hideous energy after home again, home again from a foreign shore, and said he wouldn't give a dam for a tug-load of such rot. Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement, so the singing and talking presently ceased, which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. Then the male members of the party moved to the folksoul to smoke and gossip. There were several old steamboat men along, and I learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester. Postage, graduated by distance, from the local post office in Paradise to New York, five dollars. From New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr. Manchester very well. I called on him once ten years ago with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way half a dozen years before. A cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him, which was four feet through at the butt, and sixty-five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the question asked and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltreous fraud 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 friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. Q, when your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then? Nothing but about how happy you all are? No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. Q, how is it that spirits that are content to spend an 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? A, yes. Q, you know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it in the way of crime that will reasonably ensure 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 uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for. You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true? A, yes. Q, then name the day of the month. Much fumbling with pencil on the part of the medium accompanied by violent spasmotic jerkings of his head and body for some little time. Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them. Q, then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? This was granted to be the case. Q, this is very curious. Well, then, what year was it? More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms on the part of the medium. Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year. Q, this is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last question to you, before we part to meet no more. For even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name. Did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? A, after long hesitation and many throws and spasms. Natural death. This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. This man had plenty of clients, has plenty yet. He receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are filled with advice, advice from spirits, who don't know as much as a tadpole, and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One of these clients was a man whom the spirits, if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester, were teaching how to contrive an improved railway-car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomeer activity than talking for ever about how happy we are. END OF CHAPTER XXVIII. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain CHAPTER XIX. EPISODES IN PILOT LIFE. In the course of the tugboat gossip it came out 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 because they were peculiarly gifted agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries. The reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from eruptions of undesirable strangers like the pilot-house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm houses as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by and by come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. But I did not learn that any of these pilot farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them. They support their farms. The pilot farmer disappears from the river annually about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. Then he appears again in damaged home-spun, combs the hay seed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during 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 not retire to it. He knew a trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares, out of every three loads of corn, the expert to have two, and the pilot the third. But at the end of the season the pilot received no 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 had adventures. The outcome fortunate sometimes, but not in all cases. Captain Montgomery, whom I had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet in the great battle before Memphis. When his vessel went down he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. He was always a cool man. Nothing could disturb his serenity. Once when he was captain of the Crescent City I was bringing the boat into port at Norlins and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck but received none. I had stopped the wheels and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was evening, dim twilight, the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and I suppose the intellectual end of the captain 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 duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves, which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer, the crash was bound to come very soon, and still that hat never budged. For, alas, the captain was napping in the Texas. Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was 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 stepped out on deck and said with heavenly serenity, set her back on both, which I did. But a trifle late, however. For the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again, in like circumstances. One of the pilots whom I had known when I was 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 went out over the breastboard with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late. But there are no instances of a pilot deserting his post to save his life, while by remaining and sacrificing it he might secure other lives from destruction. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics too. The Cub pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel and die there when occasion requires. In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago in White River to save the lives of other men. He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sandbar some distance away, all could be saved. But that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to ensure the loss of many lives. He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water, but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied, as 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, and no life was lost but the pilots. There used to be a monument to this young fellow in that Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our down-trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. The tugboat gossip informed me that Dick Kenner was dead, blown up near Memphis and killed, that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war, one or two of them shot down at the wheel, that another and very particular friend whom I had 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 the city, and had never been seen again, was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought. That Ben Thornburg, who was dead long ago, also his wild cub whom I used to quarrel with all through every daylight watch, a heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, and always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard one day, and chained him to a lifeboat on the hurricane deck. Thornburg's cub could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear to see what he would do. He was promptly gratified. The bear chased him around and around the deck for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lads' coattail and went into the Texas to chew it. The off-watch turned out with alacrity and left the bear in soul possession. He presently grew lonesome and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat, visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him, and a voiceless vacancy behind him. And when his owner 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 fell dead at the wheel from heart disease in 1869. The captain was on the 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, blown into the river from the wheel and disabled. The water was very cold. He clung to a cotton bale, mainly with his teeth, and floated until nearly exhausted. When he was rescued by some deckhands who were on a piece of the wreck, they tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, 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 romance nevertheless. When I knew him, he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, good- hearted, full of careless generosity, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early and come to nothing. In a western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and 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, whose name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative, got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned, and the old foreigner found them out and rebuked them. Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married, that they had been privately married. Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. After that they were able to continue their sin without concealment. By and by the foreigner's wife died, and presently he followed after her. Friends of the family assembled to mourn, and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. The will was opened and solemnly read. It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to Mrs. George Johnson. And there was no such person. The young sinners fled forth then and did a very foolish thing, married themselves before an obscure justice of the peace, and got him to antidate the thing. That did no sort of good. The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately and legally and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves with all. Such are the actual facts, and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation.