In time, a man answered, stating his wife was a very small child during the war, but she remembered a quantity of family silver had been removed from her father’s house. She was now the last remaining one of her family, but she could identify one article in the lot, a unique urn-shaped pitcher, of which she submitted a drawing, from memory. The trunk with its valuable contents had just been dispatched to the woman....
My little daughter and I took many rambles down into the picturesque parts of the old city. I presume in New York it might be called slumming, but every old crawfish ditch and dirty alley was dear to me. Even the old French cemeteries down Basin Street were full of tender memories. When we went home from such tramps, and Elise told, in her graphic way, of the tumbledown appearance of whole streets that mother was so enthusiastic over, our genial host, Phine’s husband, would say, “Why don’t you go up St. Charles Avenue? We fixed that up fine to show to visitors.” But St. Charles Avenue had no sweet memories for me, it had not existed in my day. We saw St. Charles Avenues every day, at home. We had no old French cemeteries, the inscription on almost every tomb calling forth memories of dear, departed Creole friends.
The old cathedral and its environs had to have several visits. I had to show my little girl (oh, how reminiscent I was, to be sure!) the very shop whose windows I used to look into, at the beads, corals, shells, etc., from Southern seas. And, my dear, the very man with gold earrings was there, shuffling around with strings of rough coral beads, and conch shells, that very man (so it seemed)—and he was not a day older—that was doing that very thing seventy years ago, when I had to tip-toe to get a good view of that entrancing interior.
In the narrow street by the cathedral we purchased rosaries for our Catholic maids at home. We walked up and down the narrow way, looking for a tiny shop where I had bought, years and years ago, materials and a book of instruction for the making of paper flowers. Roses and jasmines and pinks and honeysuckles were hung in lavish profusion all about my plantation home, and they lent quite a festive charm on wintry, rainy days, when there was not a blooming plant to be had. I was reveling so far into the sweet past that I was almost surprised that the hustling little French woman (of sixty years ago) was not there, behind her stack of paper goods, like the man with the gold earrings, but she wasn’t, and the very shop was gone, too.
Eliza Ripley
We sat, to rest, on benches in the old Place d’Armes. I looked at those Pontalba buildings, that faded, dilapidated, ramshackle row, and remembered how fine and imposing it was, in my day, and how I had wished that father would take one of those elegant houses, where we would be so near the French market, and the shop of beads and shells, and monkeys and parrots.
We strolled up Royal Street, and the little girl saw the house in which the Boufords lived, sixty years ago. The saucy child ventured to remark she always had thought I visited nice people, but they must have lived in shabby houses. I did not notice her comment, but proceeded to point to the balcony where I stood to see a Mardi Gras procession, a frolicsome lot of the festive beaux of the period, and to catch the bonbons and confetti they threw at us from the landeaus and gaily decked wagons. It was long after the Mardi Gras of the thirties, and long, long before the Mardi Gras of to-day, a kind of interregnum, that the young fashionable men were turning into a festival. I recall Mrs. Slocomb’s disgust when Cuthbert fell ill of pneumonia, after his exposure that day. Cuthbert Slocomb was chubby and blond, and with bare neck and short sleeves, tied up with baby blue ribbon, a baby cap similarly decorated, he made a very good counterfeit baby, seated, too, in a high chair, with a rattle to play with. The “mamma” had long black ringlets and wore a fashionable bonnet. I have forgotten, if in fact I ever knew, what youth represented the mamma. There were no masks, but the disguises with paint, powder and wigs were sufficient to make them unrecognizable. If Cuthbert Slocomb had not been ill, I probably would not have known the “baby.”
A New Orleans Cemetery.