After looking at them awhile, they were passed round to the balance of the fiendish-looking rascals, and I was kept in terrible suspense ten minutes longer.
I tried to get off several of my well-authenticated bad jokes, but I choked in the utterance, and my smile was no doubt a sardonic grin. I wiped the perspiration from my brow so frequently that one of the most intellectual of the "brutes" relieved the monotony of the occasion by observing that it was a very hot day, to which I acquiesced, feeling quite glad to have a guerrilla speak to a prisoner.
The countryman who had driven me thus far was speechless. He thought of his carriage and horses, and visions of their being immediately possessed by Morgan or Forrest had rendered him powerless. After a few questions as to where we left the train, and as to the number of passengers on board, the citizen cavalry, or Union guards, as they proved to be, told us we might proceed, that we were all right, but to be very careful, as Forrest was reported near that region; they hardly thought it safe to attempt to get to Green River.
This brewed fresh trouble to me, the owner of the horses and carriage refusing positively to proceed on the journey. In vain I expostulated, telling him I would pay for his horses out of the sinking fund of the Times office, in case of their loss. It was no go, and I was compelled to retreat. I felt very much like building some fortifications in the woods, and making a stand, but, remembering the saying, "Discretion is the better part of valor," retreated, and fell back upon the National Hotel, in Louisville, with all the luxuries prepared by Charley Metcalf, Major Harrow, and Colonel Myers.[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER XXX.
A Reporter's Idea of Mules — Letter from Kentucky — Chaplain Gaddis turns Fireman — Gaddis and the Secesh Grass-widow.
A Reporter's Idea of Mules.
Junius Browne, describing a mule and his antics, says: "Now, be it known, I never had any faith in, though possessed of abundant commiseration for, a mule. I always sympathized with Sterne in his sentimental reverie over a dead ass, but for a living one, I could never elevate my feeling of pity either into love or admiration. The mule in question, however, seemed to be possessed of gentle and kindly qualifications. He appeared to have reached that degree of culture that disarms viciousness and softens stubbornness into tractability. I believed the sober-looking animal devoid of tricks peculiar to his kind, such as attempting to run up dead walls in cities, and climb trees in the country, mistaking himself for a perpetual motion, and trying to kick Time through the front window of Eternity. I was deceived in the docile-looking brute. He secured me as his rider by false pretenses. He won my confidence, and betrayed it shamefully. That he was a good mule, in some respects, I'll willingly testify; but in others, he was deeply depraved. He exhibited a disposition undreamed of by me, unknown before in the brothers and sisters of his numerous family. In brief, he was a sectarian mule; a bigot that held narrow views on the subject of religion; believed Hebrew the vernacular of the devil, and regarded the Passover with malevolent eyes. Confound such a creature, there was no hope for him! Who could expect to free him from his prejudices? He hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have been saved to him, and more to a number of unoffending gentlemen from church, as the sequel of my 'o'er true tale' will prove.
"The train got off about eight o'clock, on a cloudy, rainy, muddy, suicidal morning, and the material that composed it was worthy of illustration by Cruikshank. The procession was singularly varied, and supremely bizarre. There were the army-wagons, with sick and wounded soldiers, lumbering heavily along; the paroled prisoners wading through the mire; cotton-buyers, on foot and on horseback; members of the twelve tribes of Israel, with all possible modes of conveyance—in broken buggies, in dilapidated coaches, on bare-boned Rosinantes, on superannuated oxen, with fragmentary reins, rope reins, and no reins; spurring, swearing, hallooing, and gesticulating toward Memphis, in mortal terror lest the rebels would capture them again, and some of their hard-earned gains. Pauvre Juils! They would have excited the pity of a pawnbroker, if he had not known them, so frightened and anxious and disconsolate they looked. They could not have appeared more miserable if they had just learned that a brass watch they had sold for silver had turned out gold. The mule trotted along briskly and quietly enough until he beheld the grotesque vision of the heterogeneously-mounted Israelites. Then he displayed most extraordinary conduct. He pawed, he hawed, he kicked, all the while glancing at the sons of Jerusalem, and braying louder and more discordant every moment. I could not understand the mule's idiosyncrasies. Possibly, I thought, the doctrine of the metempsychosis may be true, and this brute, in the early stages of its development, once have been in love. He has a fit on him now, I fancied—he is once more possessed of a petticoat. Why not? If love converts men into asses, why should not asses, in their maddest moments, act like men in love? The mule's ire was culminating. I dug my spurs into his side. Vain effort! He was bent on mischief, and malignant against the persecuted race. If he had been in the House of Commons, (and many of his brethren are there,) I know he never would have voted for the admission of Jews into the English Parliament. Before I could anticipate his movement, he rushed at several pedestrian Hebrews and kicked the wind out of their stomachs and three pairs of green spectacles from their noses. While endeavoring to recover their glasses, the mule knocked their hats off with his hoofs, and impaired the perfect semicircle of their proboscis, thus imitating the rebels—by destroying their bridges totally. The infuriated brute then ran for an old buggy, and, by supreme perseverance, kicked it over, and its two Hebrew occupants, into the road, where they fell, head-foremost, into the mire, growling profanely, like tigers that have learned German imperfectly, and were trying to swear, in choice Teutonic, about the peculiar qualities of Limburger cheese. In their sudden subversion, the Israelites dropped three fine watches out of their pockets, and the mule, with an unprecedented voracity, and determined on having a good time, ate the chronometers without any apparent detriment to digestion. The owners of the watches were frenzied. They glanced at my beast, and were about to devour him, hoping thereby to get the timepieces back. They did not violate the third commandment. They could not. They were too mad. They merely hissed rage, like a boiling tea-kettle, and grew purple in the face, and spun round in the road, from the excess of their wrath. Your correspondent was alarmed. He feared the mule would devour the Hebrews themselves, and he knew, if that were done, the animal would explode, and said animal had not been paid for. No time was given for reflection. Off ran the mule again, and made a pedal attack on a small Hebrew with a huge nasal organ, seated on top of a decayed coach, drawn by a horse, a cow, and three negroes. The quadruped made a herculean effort to kick the diminutive Shylock from his seat, but all in vain. The altitude was too great, and, in the midst of his exertions, he kicked himself off his feet, and fell over into a gulley, in which he alighted and stood on his head, as if he had been trained in a circus. The position was admirable, and so worthy of imitation that I stood on my head also, in two feet of mire, and beckoned with my boots for some passing pedestrians to come and pull me out, as they would a radish from a kitchen-garden. The mule resumed his normal position speedily, and went off in his well-sustained character of a Jew-hunter. I was less fortunate. Three teamsters drew my boots from my feet, and tears from my eyes, before they could extricate me. And when I was removed from terra firma, I resembled a hickory stump dragged out by the roots, or a large cat-fish that had left his native element, and, seized with a fit of science, had endeavored to convert himself into a screw of the Artesian well. Placed feet downward on the ground again, I could not thank my deliverers or swear at the mule. I was dumb with astonishment and the mud, having swallowed eighteen ounces avoirdupois weight of the sacred soil of Mississippi while endeavoring to express my admiration of the performance of the mule. When I had removed the mire from my optics, in which cotton-seed would have grown freely, I beheld the mule in the dim distance. I could not see the brute plainly, but I could determine his course by the frequent falling of a human figure along the road. I knew the figures were those of his enemies, the much-abused Hebrews—that he was still wreaking his vengeance on the representatives of Israel—that he was fulfilling the unfortunate destiny of a misguided and merciless mule. Strange animal! Had the honest tradesman ever sold his grandfather a bogus watch? or inveigled his innocent sire into the mysterious precincts of a mock-auction? Alas! history does not record, and intuition will not reveal.
"My narrative is over. I did not go to Memphis. I returned, limping, to town, mentally ejaculating, like many adventurous gentlemen who, before me, have recklessly attempted to ride the peculiar beast, 'D——n a mule, any how!'"