It was a dismal night in the cars. The weather changed, and it grew suddenly very cold. Now the stove was red hot; and now the fire was out, with both car-doors wide open at some stopping-place.
At two in the morning we reached Corinth. A driver put me into his hack, and drove about town, through the freezing mud, to find me a lodging. The hotels were full. The boarding-houses were full,—all but one, in which, with a fellow-traveller, I was fortunate enough at last to find a room with two beds.
It was a large, lofty room, the door fifteen feet high from the floor, the walls eighteen feet. It had been an elegant apartment once; but now the windows were broken, the plastering and stucco-work disfigured, the laths smashed in places, there were bullet-holes through the walls, and large apertures in the wainscots. The walls were covered with devices, showing that Federal soldiers had been at home there; such as a shield, admirably executed, bearing the motto: “The Union, it must be preserved”; “Heaven Bless our Native Land”; “God of Battles, speed the Right”; and so forth.
The beds were tumbled, some travellers having just got out of them to take the train. A black woman came in to make them. The lady of the house also came in,—a fashionably bred Southern woman, who had been reduced, by the fortunes of the Rebellion, from the condition of a helpless mistress of many servants, to that of a boarding-house keeper.
I asked for a single room, which I was somewhat curtly told I couldn’t have. I then asked for more bedclothes,—for the weather continued to grow cold, and the walls of the room offered little protection against it. She said, “I reckon you’re mighty particular!” I replied that she was quite correct in her reckoning, and insisted on the additional clothing. At last I got it, very fortunately; for my room-mate, who did not make the same demand, nearly froze in the other bed before daylight.
In the morning a black man came in and made a fire. Then, before I was up, a black girl came in to bring a towel, and to break the ice in the wash-basin. That the water might not freeze again before I could use it, (for the fire, as some one has said, “couldn’t get a purchase on the cold,”) I requested her to place the basin on the hearth; also to shut the door; for every person who passed in or out left all doors wide, affording a free passage from my bed to the street.
“You’re cold-natered, an’t ye?” said the girl, to whose experience my modest requests appeared unprecedented.
Afterwards I went out to breakfast in a room that showed no chimney, and no place for a stove. The outer door was open much of the time, and when it was shut the wind came in through a great round hole cut for the accommodation of cats and dogs. This, be it understood, was a fashionable Southern residence; and this had always been the dining-room, in winter the same as in summer, though no fire had ever been built in it. The evening before, the lady had said to me, “The Yankees are the cause that we have no better accommodations to offer you,” and I had cheerfully forgiven her. But the Yankees were not the cause of our breakfasting in such a bleak apartment.
Everybody at table was pinched and blue. The lady, white and delicate, sat wrapped in shawls. She was very bitter against the Yankees, until I smilingly informed her that her remarks were particularly interesting to me, as I was a Yankee myself.
“From what State are you, Sir?”