The light-house upon the bluff, at the north-west corner of the city, is well deserving of notice, though not properly ranked under the public buildings of Natchez. It is a simple tower, about forty feet in height, commanding a section of the river, north and south, of about twelve miles. But the natural inquiry of the stranger is, "What is its use?" A light-house on a river bank, three hundred miles from the sea, has certainly no place in the theory of the utilitarian. The use of it its projectors must determine. Were a good telescope placed in its lantern it would make a fine observatory, and become a source of amusement as well as of improvement to the citizens, to whom it is now merely a standing monument, in proof of the proverb, that "wisdom dwelleth not in all men." The hotels are very fine. Parker's, on one of the front squares, near the bluff, is a handsome, costly, and very extensive building, three stories in height, with a stuccoed front, in imitation of granite, and decidedly the largest edifice in the city. Its rooms are large, spacious, and elegantly furnished; suited rather for gentlemen and their families, who choose a temporary residence in town, than for transient travellers and single men, who more frequently resort to the "Mansion-house." This is not so large a structure as the former, though its proprietor is enlarging it, on an extensive scale. It has long been celebrated as an excellent house. Its accommodations for ladies are also very good, their rooms opening into ventilated piazzas, or galleries, as they are termed here, which are as necessary to every house in this country as fire-places to a northern dwelling. These galleries, or more properly verandas, are constructed—not like the New-England piazza, raised on columns half the height of the building, with a flat roof, and surrounded by a railing—but by extending a sloping roof beyond the main building, supported at its verge by slender columns; as the houses are usually of but one story in this country, southerners having a singular aversion to mounting stairs. Such porticoes are easily constructed. No house, particularly a planter's, is complete without this gallery, usually at both the back and front; which furnishes a fine promenade and dining-room in the warm season, and adds much to the lightness and beauty of the edifice.
There is another very good hotel here, equivalent to Richardson's, in New-Orleans, or the Elm-street house in Boston, where the country people usually put up when they come in from the distant counties to dispose of their cotton. It fronts on "Cotton-square," as a triangular area, formed by clipping off a corner of one of the city squares, is termed; which is filled every day, during the months of November, December, and January, with huge teams loaded with cotton bales, for which this is the peculiar market place.
The "City hotel," lately enlarged and refurnished, is now becoming quite a place of fashionable resort.
XXVIII.
Society of Natchez—New-England adventurers—Their prospects—The Yankee sisterhood—Southern bachelors—Southern society—Woman—Her past and present condition—Single combats—Fireside pleasures unknown—A change—Town and country—Characteristic discrepancies.
Until within a very short period, the society of Natchez has exhibited one peculiar characteristic, in the estimation of a northerner, in whose migrating land "seven women," literally fulfilling the prediction, "take hold of one man;" a prediction which has, moreover, been fulfilled, according to the redoubtable and most classical Crockett, in the west; but by no means in this place, or in any of the embryo cities, which are springing up like Jonah's gourd, along the banks of the great "father of waters." The predominance of male population in the countless villages that are dotting the great western valley, rising up amidst the forests, one after another, as stars come out at evening, and almost in as rapid succession, is a necessary consequence of the natural laws of migration. In the old Atlantic and New-England states, the sons, as they successively grow up to manhood, take the paternal blessing and their little patrimony, often all easily packed and carried in a knapsack, but oftener in their heads, and bend their way to the "great west," to seek their fortunes, with them no nursery tale, but a stern and hardly earned reality:—there to struggle—prosper or fail—with blighted hopes go down to early graves, or, building a fire-side of their own, gather around it sons, who, in their declining years, shall, in their turn, go forth from the paternal roof to seek beyond the mountains of the Pacific shore a name, a fire-side, and a home of their own. And such is human life!
To this migratory propensity is to be attributed the recent peculiar state of society in this city, and throughout the whole western country. The sons are the founders of these infant emporiums, but the daughters stay at home in a state of single blessedness—blessings (?) to the maternal roof, till some bold aspirants for the yoke of hymen return, after spying out the land, take them under their migratory wings and bear them to their new home. But unluckily for six out of every seven of the fair daughters of the east, the pioneers of the west feel disposed to pass their lives in all the solitary dignity of the bachelor state. Wrapped up in their speculations, their segars and their "clubs," not even a second Sabine device could move them to bend their reluctant necks to the noose. Those, however, who do take to themselves "helpmeets," are more gallant and chivalrous than their Roman predecessors in their mode of obtaining them, not demurring to travel, like Cœlebs, many hundred leagues to the land of steady habits, to secure the possession of some one of its lovely flowers. The concentrating of a great number of young gentlemen for a permanent residence in one spot, without a suitable proportion of the gentler sex to enliven and relieve the rougher shades of such an assemblage, must produce a state of society, varying essentially from that in communities where the division is more equal. Hotels, or offices of professional business must be their residences—their leisure hours must be spent in lounging at each other's rooms like college students, (to whose mode of life their's is not dissimilar,) or in the public rooms of the hotels, cafés, or gambling houses. Habits difficult to eradicate are contracted, of dark and fatal consequences to many; and a rude, cavalier bearing is thereby imperceptibly acquired, more congenial with the wild, free spirit of the middle ages, than the refinement of modern times. The bold and rugged outlines natural to the sterner character of man, can only be softened by that refining influence which the cultivated female mind irresistibly exerts upon society. Wherever woman—
"Blessing and blest, where'er she moves,"