“I have just returned from a trip in the outlying country to find your two letters awaiting me. Since leaving New Orleans I have been gadding about the country north, east, south and west, and am not yet done. The Téche country is mightily interesting if one can only live through it. The days come and go and are filled with enjoyment, but as to the night no man knoweth what may be in store for him. My hotel experiences would interest you, but I cannot write them. I left New Orleans with a Mr. William King as a companion, a young man who knows the country thoroughly and whose company Mr. Warner recommended I should request, as Warner was obliged to leave for the north. By the time we reach New Orleans again about five days hence, we shall have traveled together over one thousand miles of the Téche and other Louisiana territory. The weather has been charming, no hot weather which has not been deliciously tempered by the never failing breeze from the gulf. Cool breezy nights.
“We have driven for a whole day over a prairie peopled with all sorts of wild things in the way of birds. Meadow larks, plover, snipe, white and blue herons, buzzards, egrets, many birds so tame that they could easily be killed by a cut of my whip. We drove through acres and acres of blue flag in blossom, and for miles pursued the shaded roads through dense woods draped in the ever-present festoons of moss—in this country seen in its fullest perfection, every tree being laden with it, hanging like heavy trailing curtains, sometimes twenty feet in length. The effect in a breeze is indescribably beautiful. The Téche Country is the paradise of Louisiana, and comes as a welcome contrast to the filth and squalor of the city of New Orleans with which I was so nauseated. To-night we leave for the Averys’. We shall arrive there to-night and I anticipate a fine time visiting Jefferson’s Island and making trips up the various bayous. We shall try to get away from there Friday evening in time to get the steamer ‘Iberia’ here by which we shall return, through a sail of about 300 miles by lake, bayou, and Mississippi River to New Orleans. Thereat I shall spend about three days and then start for the homeward trip, stopping over at Mobile for a day or so. I will be home about June 1 as I originally approximated.
“Of course you know that I am anxious to be at home again. The only way that I can keep my spirits is to throw my mind into the work and interest myself with my surroundings. In the main my health has been good, in fact, excellent, in spite of starvation cookery and God-forsaken hostelries which anywhere else under heaven would be considered good material for bonfires and their proprietors hung.
“A beautiful country and full of interest, if, forsooth, one might exist without a stomach. Everything is Creole—Creole cows, Creole milk, Creole eggs—even the ‘niggers’ are Creoles, and all speak French. My limited vocabulary of pure Parisian French has stood a heavy drain and has occasionally precipitated upon my hearers consequences which I feared would prove serious;—item—Night before last we stopped in a hamlet of shanties and at last found the ‘Hotel,’ kept by a talkative, voluble French idiot and his wife. The only guest bed in the shebang I occupied, and Mr. King slept on a mattress on the floor in another room. I was tired and suffering from an attack of nervous dyspepsia, from the greasy grub which I had been forced to eat in the face of starvation (everything here even a boiled egg is taught to swim in hot fat, and is only rescued therefrom by the famished boarder, who sometimes is obliged to bolt it after scraping off the congealed lard). It was with difficulty that I could get to sleep on the night in question, owing to my indisposition, together with a certain nervous apprehension as to the census of my immediate surroundings. I had barely dropped off into a snooze when I was startled by the movement of the window shutter near my bed, when looking, I observed a mule who was making a meal of a table-cloth near my bed. Once more after lying awake an hour I had begun to congratulate myself on prospects of slumber, when a shrill piercing note of a mocking-bird struck up its piccolo in the dead of night, another and another joined in the chorus, and kept this up for an hour before it dawned upon me that the birds were in cages on the farther side of the very partition of my room. On which discovery you may perhaps imagine how the limited French vocabulary at my command was exhausted and reinforced, but to no purpose. I raved and swore in Dutch, French, and Pidgeon English and was at length compelled to yell my colored servant (driver, servant, and interpreter) from his slumbers and make him translate a short address to the French idiot (who snorted in blissful sleep in concert with his spouse in another quarter of the shanty) to the effect that the offending birds be immediately chucked out of doors, beheaded, or strangled. The shrieking trio was finally removed to the rear but my sleep was ruined for that night. Only toward morning after dawn had just begun to lighten the east did I begin to feel drowsy, but at this point the ‘moqueurs’ were again restored to their original places and I was compelled to have them again removed, and by this time Monsieur and Madame were up and about preparing our morning ‘grease’ which they seemed to be doing by sheer force of lungs and belaboring of pans and kettles.
“At breakfast I drank the proprietor’s health.
“‘Monsieur, votre santé! Votre hospitalité est magnifique! Votre table est bien gré! Votre moqueur—! Ah! Votre moqueur! (a pause with dramatic enthusiasm, then continuing) vous procurez deux, trois, quatre plus moqueurs! et votre hôtel est perfection!’
“This eloquent outburst greatly amused the Madame, but the old man seemed ‘busting’ with suppressed emotion, which probably, had he then been in pocket for his bill, would have shown some outward token.
“We left this place for the day and after settling the bill, we told them that we would leave our satchels until we returned in the evening, whereupon ‘la madame’ through my interpreter, asked me if she should prepare a meal for us for evening. I asked her in reply if she would cook anything I wished, to order. She replied ‘Oui! anything I can get.’ Whereupon I ordered ‘three moqueurs on toast!’ much to her discomfiture, and she grumbled to herself as she left us, which grumble being translated would signify, ‘My God! three mocking birds! that feast would cost you thirty dollars!’”
The rest of the year was spent in working up the material thus gathered, and much of the following winter and spring. The summer of 1887 was passed in Washington, Connecticut, where, as a note in his journal tells us, he “spent a very busy season. Made many drawings for two prospective articles on ‘Midnight Rambles’ and ‘Insect Botanists,’ besides many flower-studies and a number of water-colors. Very busy on the ‘Memorial’ volume to Mr. Gunn. Made a large number of drawings for botany.” The last remark refers to a large scheme which now possessed his teeming brain, a plan to write an illustrated botany. He never dropped his purpose,—indeed, abandoned plans were unknown in his life-history,—and before his death he had accumulated over 1500 drawings toward such a work. There have been many such undertakings put forth, successful and valuable. But it is impossible to think without a pang of the wonderful work he would have made out of his accurate knowledge and his matchless art!
The “Memorial” was published in 1887, and he went on with the articles and the water-colors, busy all the time, and always laying out work in advance of his swiftest execution. The spring of 1888 brought the opportunity for a trip to Europe, which included a tour in Great Britain, France, Holland, and Switzerland, with a fortnight in London and another in Paris. His camera and his pencil were both busy, but the new experiences made only an episode in his busy life. He was interested in all the art he saw, and the life of the people appealed to him there, as it did at home. A letter describing his impressions of Holland shows the spirit in which he traveled and the things he elected to see.