During that visit I went to the cemetery Decoration Day. Mind you, I have seen about forty Decoration days, North—but this one in my own Southland, among my own beloved dead, has been the only Decoration Day I have ever seen in a cemetery. (I wish my feelings were not quite so strong.) Phine and I stood beside the tomb that contains the dust of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, a man I had known well, a contemporary and valued friend of my father’s, a man whose children and grandchildren were dear to me. We saw the solemn procession file in, and halt a little beyond us. The band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and hundreds of voices joined in the musical prayer. I could not sing, I never could, but I could weep, and my eyes were not the only moist ones in the assembly. Such a throng of sober, sad people there was, such a lot of veterans, many in shabby, weather-stained gray, that bore evidence of hard service....
Phine had kept track of the people from whom I had been so long separated that age had obliterated means by which I could recognize them. As a veteran, in the shabby old gray (I felt like taking everyone such by the hand), approached, Phine caught my arm and whispered “Douglas West,” and at the same moment his eye met mine with a flash of recognition. I had not seen Douglas for over thirty years. And weren’t we glad to meet? on that ground, too, so sacred to both of us. And didn’t we meet and meet and talk and talk, many times thereafter, in Phine’s dear little parlor on Carondelet Street? Indeed, we did.
Later on, Phine whispered, “You knew that man, I’ll tell you who he is after he passes us.” A quite tottering, wrinkled, old man passed. I gave him a good stare, shook my head. I did not know, nor think I ever had known him. It was A. B. Cammack—who would have believed it? He was a bachelor in 1850, the time when I thought a man of thirty was an old man. We happened to be fellow passengers on that fashionable A No. 1 steamboat, Belle Key. I was a frisky young miss, and Mr. Cammack was, as I say, an old bachelor. He did not know, nor want to know anybody on the boat, but it happened he was introduced to our small party, at the moment of sailing, so we had a reluctant sort of bowing acquaintance for the first day or so. Broderie Anglaise was all the rage. Any woman who had time for frivolité, as the Creoles called tatting, was busy working eyelets on linen. Of course I had Broderie, too. Mr. Cammack gradually thawed, and brought a book to read to me while my fingers flew over the fascinating eyelets. The book, I distinctly remember, was “Aunt Patsy’s Scrap Bag,” a medley of silly nonsensical stuff, written by a woman so long dead and so stupid while she lived that nobody even hears of her now, but Mr. Cammack was immensely entertaining and witty, and we roared over that volume, and his comments thereon. I have often dwelt on that steamboat episode, but I doubt if it ever gave him a moment’s thought. I really think if it had been like my meeting with Douglas West we might have had quite a bit of fun, living again that week on the Belle Key. A hearty laugh, such as we had together, so many years before, might have smoothed some of the wrinkles from his careworn face, and a few crow’s feet out of mine. But he never knew, possibly would not have cared if he had known, that we almost touched hands in the crowd on that Decoration Day.
On and on we strolled, past a grand monument to the memory of Dr. Choppin, whom I knew so well, and loved too, girl fashion, when he was twenty, and who sailed away, boy fashion, to complete his medical education in Paris. Maybe if we had met, in the flesh, on that Decoration Day, it might have been a la Cammack. We never did meet, after that memorable sailing away, but he has a tender niche in my heart even yet, and I was pleased to see some loving hand had decorated that sacred spot....
Phine and I strolled about after the ceremonies were completed. She had a toy broom and a toy watering pot in the keeper’s cottage, and was reluctant to leave before she had straightened and freshened the bouquets we had placed on the tombs of the dead she loved, and swept away the dust, and watered the little grass border again.
A year ago she herself fell asleep and was laid to rest in the lovely cemetery, and with her death the last close tie was broken that bound me to New Orleans.
Eliza Moore, tenth of the twelve children of Richard Henry and Betsey Holmes Chinn, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on the first day of February, 1832.
Three years later Judge Chinn moved his family to New Orleans, where he continued the practice of law until his death in ’47.