Books of travel in the United States generally contain some remarks on the personal attractions of the mixed race in New Orleans. From the little I saw of them, I can add that they appeared to me as spirituel as the French themselves. I am more disposed to believe that this is hereditary, than that it is the result merely of imitation. But with respect to their personal appearance, after having of late seen so many of the coarse and ill-visaged half-breeds in which an Anglo-Saxon was the father, I was much struck with their superiority in face and figure. The features of many might almost have been called delicate and refined; and it was so, strange to say, even when very perceptible traces of the African nose and lips remained, and these still surmounted with the African wool. I understood that this was also to a great extent the case where a Spaniard was the father. The reason of this difference I believe to be a very obvious one, that Frenchmen and Spaniards, having much smaller bones than the Northern nations, are better able on that account to correct, in their mixed descendants, the grossness of the physiognomy and figure of the African. The German half-breeds are still more unattractive than the Anglo-Saxon; the Scandinavian are worse; but the worst of all are those whose long-headed and high cheek-boned fathers come from the north of the Tweed.
The Best Road in the World.
No one without having seen the thing himself—and the jolting will impress it on his memory—can form any proper conception of the holes, the mud, and the pools of water which not unfrequently constitute what is called in America a road. At Augusta I had seen axles disappear in the main streets. But the most advanced specimen of this kind of means of communication I ever passed over, was in going to the station of the Mississippi and Tennessee railway at New Orleans. I could not see or hear that any attempt had ever been made to form a road. The traffic was great, and was of course confined by the houses to a narrow street. It was a natural swamp, and there had been lately a great deal of rain. My reflections on coming at last to the station were, that American horses were wonderful animals, and that in nothing did the Americans themselves show their inventive powers so triumphantly as in constructing carriages which could carry heavy loads day after day through such difficulties;—I do not say through such roads, because there was nothing but a collection of the hindrances to travelling which a road is made to remedy.
This is a subject on which the Americans themselves are very tolerant and easily satisfied. ‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me, on the top of Wells and Fargo’s coach, as we were passing over the Plains to Denver, ‘Sir, this is the finest piece of road in the world.’ As nothing had been said previously about roads, and as what we were passing along was merely a freight-track on the dry prairie, four inches deep in dust and sand and earth in fine weather, and as many or more inches deep in mud in wet weather, I intimated that I believed I had not heard rightly his remark. He then repeated his assertion even more emphatically than at first, ‘that it was the best piece of road in the world.’ I was beginning to explain to him, as courteously as I could, why I should hardly have ventured to call it a road at all, when he stopped me short with, ‘Sir, we have no faith in European practices. I am a judge of roads. I have seen all kinds of roads; and I have seen roads in all kinds of places; and this is just what I said it was, the finest piece of road in the world.’ Over this model road, sometimes with six good horses, never with less than four, we were able to manage about six miles an hour.
The railroad from New Orleans, for the first mile or two, lies through a most dreary dismal swamp. The water stands everywhere. The palmetto and the swamp cedar grow out of the water. The trees are completely shrouded with the grey Spanish moss. The trees and the moss look as if they had long been dead. One who enters the city by this approach (had ever any other great city such an approach?) must carry with him some not very encouraging thoughts. Whenever in the summer or autumn the wind blows from this direction, I suppose it will remind him of the yellow fever, the horrible scourge of the place.
A Prayer for a Brother Minister.
The swamp I just mentioned is succeeded by sugar plantations, the costly machinery of which had been destroyed during the war. They now appeared to be used as grazing farms for cattle brought up from Texas. On one of these ruined plantations I saw some hedges of the Cherokee rose. This is an evergreen, and makes too wide a hedge, though its height may be an advantage in that climate. It is a common opinion in New Orleans that all these sugar plantations will eventually be re-established; but that this will never be done by the present proprietors, who are all ruined, and who will have to sell the land at a merely nominal price, which is all that the land without the machinery is worth. Those who will buy the land will be companies, or Northern men who will have capital enough to purchase new machinery, and to pay the heavy costs of carrying on the cultivation of the cane and manufacture of the sugar.
Americans are very careful not to give offence in what they say to others. An American bishop remarked to me that the only exception to this rule was to be found among ministers of religion, and among them only in their prayers. He mentioned, as an instance, something that had occurred at a public meeting at which he had himself been present. A minister had opened the proceedings with prayer. He was followed by a rival preacher. The latter, after dwelling for some time on general topics, at last came up to his opponent in the following way: he prayed that the gifts of the Spirit might be poured out on all his brethren in the ministry abundantly, and then added, ‘and on behalf of our brother whose words we have just heard, we offer this special supplication, that his heart may become as soft as his head.’
CHAPTER X.
MY ONLY DELAY ON AN AMERICAN RAILWAY—NO CONCEALING ONE’S NATIONALITY—RAILWAY COW-PLOUGH—PISTOLS—MEMPHIS—EMIGRATION FROM THE SOUTH DEPRECATED—TRUE METHOD OF RESUSCITATION—THE MINISTER’S STUDY—CONVERSATION WITH TWO MINISTERS—INVITATION TO ‘GO TO CHURCH’ 150 MILES OFF—LUXURY DOES NOT SAP THE MILITARY SPIRIT—MRS. READ—ENTRY INTO EDEN—SHARE A BED-ROOM WITH A CALIFORNIAN—HOW CALIFORNIA WAS CIVILISED—HOW A SITE UPON THE SWAMP WAS CREATED FOR CAIRO—DECLINE THE FOURTH PART OF A BED-ROOM AT ODIN—‘BE GOOD TO YOURSELF.’