The little Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, looked at the gallant officer a moment and then said in a fit of enthusiastic admiration:
“By gar, Monsieur Capitaine, you are one mighty brave man! I did try him t’ree times zat way, but he no stay.”
The captain threw up his arms and—his oyster!—so runs the story.
The soil along the river bank is so rich that weeds, woods, vines, trench close and hard on the heels of the plowman. A plantation will almost perish from the earth, as it were, by a few years of abandonment. And so it is that you see miles and miles on either side—parishes on top of parishes, in fact—fast returning to barbarism, dragging the blacks by thousands down to below the level of brutes with them, as you descend from New Orleans toward the mouth of the mighty river, nearly one hundred miles from the beautiful “Crescent City.” And, ah, the superstition of these poor blacks!
You see hundreds of little white houses, old “quarters,” and all tenantless now, save one or two on each plantation. Cheap sugar and high wages, as compared with old times of slavery—but then the enormous cost of keeping up the levees, and above all, the continued peril to life and property, with a mile of swift, muddy water sweeping seaward high above your head—these things are making a desert of the richest lands on earth. We are gaining ground in the West, but we are losing ground in the South, the great, silent South.
Of course, the world, we, civilization, will turn back to this wondrous region some day, when we have settled the West; for the mouth of the mightiest river on the globe is a fact; it is the mouth by which this young nation was trained in its younger days, and we cannot ignore it in the end, however willing we may be to do so now.
Strange how wild beasts and all sorts of queer creatures are overrunning the region down there, too, growing like weeds, increasing as man decreases. I found a sort of marsh bear here. He looks like the sloth bear (Ursus Labiatus) of the Ganges, India, as you see him in the Zoo of London, only he is not a sloth, by any means. The negroes are superstitiously afraid of him, and their dogs, very numerous, and good coon dogs, too, will not touch him. His feet are large and flat, to accommodate him in getting over the soft ground, while his shaggy and misshapen body is very thin and light. His color is as unlovely as his shape—a sort of faded, dirty brown or pale blue, with a rim of dirty white about the eyes that makes him look as if he wore spectacles when he stops and looks at you.
As he is not fit to eat because he lives on fish and oysters, sportsmen will not fire at him; and as the poor, superstitious, voodoo-worshiping negroes, and their dogs, too, run away as soon as he is seen, he has quite a habit of stopping and looking at you through his queer spectacles as long as you are in sight. He looks to be a sort of second-hand bear, his shaggy, faded, dirty coat of hair looking as if he had been stuffed, like an old sofa, with the stuffing coming out—a very second-hand appearance, to be sure.