“No, sir;” and all bade us good night; but leaving the door open, commenced feats of prolonged dancing, or stamping upon the gallery, which were uproariously applauded. Then came more obscenities and profanities, apropos to fandango frolics described by the drovers. As we had barely got to sleep, several came to occupy other beds in our room. They had been drinking freely, and continued smoking in bed.
Upon the floor lay two boys of fourteen, who continued shouting and laughing after the others had at length become quiet. Some one soon said to one of them—
“You had better stop your noise; Frank says he’ll be damn’d if he don’t come in and give you a hiding.”
Frank was trying to sleep upon the gallery.
“By ——,” the boy cried, raising himself, and drawing a coat from under the pillow, “if he comes in here, I’ll be damn’d if I don’t kill him. He dare not come in here. I would like to see him come in here,” drawing from his coat pocket a revolver, and cocking it. “By ——, you may come in here now. Come in here, come in here! Do you here that?” (revolving the pistol rapidly). “—— damn me, if I don’t kill you, if you come near the door.”
This continued without remonstrance for some time, when he lay down, asking his companion for a light for his pipe, and continuing the noisy conversation until we fell asleep. The previous talk had been much of knife and pistol fights which had taken place in the county. The same boy was obliging and amiable the next morning, assisting us to bring in and saddle the horses at our departure.
One of the men here was a Yankee, who had lived so long in the Slave States that he had added to his original ruralisms a very complete collection of Southernisms, some of which were of the richest we met with. He had been in the Texas Rangers, and, speaking of the West, said he had been up round the head of the Guadaloupe “heaps and cords of times,” at the same time giving us a very picturesque account of the county. Speaking of wolves, he informed us that on the San Jacinto there were “any dimensions of them.” Obstinacy, in his vocabulary, was represented by “damnation cussedness.” He was unable to conceive of us in any other light than as two peddlers who had mistaken their ground in coming here.
At another house where we stopped (in which, by the way, we ate our supper by the light of pine knots blazing in the chimney, with an apology for the absence of candles), we heard some conversation upon a negro of the neighbourhood, who had been sold to a free negro, and who refused to live with him, saying he wouldn’t be a servant to a nigger. All agreed that he was right, although the man was well known to be kind to his negroes, and would always sell any of them who wished it. The slave had been sold because he wouldn’t mind. “If I had a negro that wouldn’t mind,” said the woman of the house, “I’d break his head, or I’d sell him; I wouldn’t have one about me.” Her own servant was standing behind her. “I do think it would be better if there wasn’t any niggers in the world, they do behave so bad, some of ’em. They steal just like hogs.”
South-western Louisiana.—Soon after crossing the Sabine, we entered a “hummock,” or tract of more fertile, oak-bearing land, known as the Big Woods. The soil is not rich, but produces cotton, in good seasons nearly a bale to the acre, and the limited area is fully occupied. Upon one plantation we found an intelligent emigrant from Mississippi, who had just bought the place, having stopped on his way into Texas, because the time drew near for the confinement of his wife. Many farms are bought by emigrants, he said, from such temporary considerations: a child is sick, or a horse exhausted; they stop for a few weeks; but summer comes, and they conclude to put in a crop, and often never move again.