The weird dead trunks, the moss and the water, contrast strikingly with the rich, bright foliage of the deciduous trees just glowing into summer life. The balmy air makes physical existence delicious, and diffuses a luxurious languor through the system. Remove your hat, close your eyes, and its strong current strokes your brow lovingly and nestles against your cheek like a pillow.
During the last week in March, I went by the New Orleans and Great Northern Railway to Jackson, Mississippi, where the State Convention was in session.
There is not in Louisiana a hill two hundred feet high. Along the railroad, smooth, grassy everglades give place to gloomy swamps, dark with the gigantic cypress and the varnished leaves of the laurel.
On the plantations, the white one-story cabins of the negroes stood in long double rows, near the ample porched and balconied residences of the planters. Young sugar-cane, resembling corn two or three weeks old, was just peering through the ground. Noble live-oaks waved their drooping boughs above the fields. The Pride-of-China tree was very abundant about the dwellings. It produces a berry on which the birds eagerly feed, though its juice is said to intoxicate them. As they do not wear revolvers or bowie-knives, it is rather a harmless form of dissipation.
Life in the City of Jackson.
Jackson was not a paradise for a man of my vocation. Containing four or five thousand people, it was one of those delightful villages, calling themselves cities, of which the sunny South by no means enjoys a monopoly—where everybody knows everybody's business, and where, upon the advent of a stranger, the entire community resolves itself into a Committee of the Whole to learn who he is, where he came from, and what he wants.
In a great metropolis, espionage was easily baffled; but in Jackson, an unknown chiel, who looked capable of "takin' notes," to say nothing of "prentin' 'em," was subject to constant and uncomfortable scrutiny.
Contrasted with the bustle of New Orleans, existence seemed an unbroken seventh-day rest, though a dire certainty possessed me, that were my errand suspected, e'en Sunday would shine no Sabbath day for me.
Some months later, a refugee, who had resided there, pictured vividly to me the indignant and bewildered astonishment of the Jacksonians, when, through a stray copy of The Tribune, they learned that one of its correspondents had not only walked with them, talked with them, and bought with them, but, less scrupulous than Shylock, had been ready to eat with them, drink with them, and pray with them.