I felt inclined to advise him to get his mouth mended, or to tell him about "a stitch in time." But he seemed so happy I did not think it worth while.
Is it worth while saying that the swamp forest continued? I think not. So please understand it, and think of the country as a flooded forest, with wonderful brown waterways stretching through the trees, just as glades of grass do elsewhere, with here and there, every now and again, a broad river-like bayou of coffee stretching to right and left, and winding out of sight round the trees, and every now and again a group of wooden cabins, most picturesquely squalid, and inhabited by coloured folk.
Does anybody know anything of these people? Are they cannibals, or polygamous, or polyandrous, or amphibious? Surely a decade of unrestricted freedom and abundant food in such solitudes as these, must have developed some extraordinary social features? At all events, it is very difficult to believe that they are ordinary mortals.
The hamlets are few and far between, and it is only once or twice during the day that we strike a village nomine dignus. Looking at a garden in one of these larger hamlets, I notice that the hollyhock and pink and petunia are favourite flowers; and it is worth remarking that it is with flowers as with everything else—the imported articles are held in highest esteem. Writing once upon tobacco cultivation in the East, I remember noting that each province between Persia and Bengal imported its tobacco from its next neighbour on the west, and exported its own eastward. It struck me as a curious illustration of the universal fancy for "foreign" goods. So with flowers. It is very seldom that the wild plants of a locality arrive at the dignity of a garden. In England we sow larkspurs; in Utah they weed them out. In England we prize the passion-flower and the verbena; in Arkansas they carefully leave them outside their garden fences. And what splendid flowers these people scorn, simply because they grow wild! Some day, I expect, it will occur to some enterprising settler that there is a market abroad for his "weeds;" and that lily-bulbs and creeper-roots are not such rubbish as others think.
Then Poplar Bluff, a crazy-looking place, with many of its houses built on piles, and a saloon that calls itself "the XIOU8 saloon." I tried to pronounce the name. Perhaps some one else can do it. Then the swamp reasserts itself, and the forest of oak and walnut, sycamore and plane. But the settlements are singularly devoid of trees, whether for fruit or shade. The people, I suppose, think there are too many about already.
And now we are in Missouri—the Mormons' 'land of promise,' and the scene of their greatest persecutions. It is a beautiful State, as Nature made it; but it almost deserves to be Jesse-Jamesed for ever for its barbarities towards the Mormons. No wonder the Saints cherish a hatred against the people, and look forward to the day when they shall come back and repossess their land. For it is an article of absolute belief among the Mormons, that some day or other they are going back to Jackson County, and numbers of them still preserve the title-deeds to the lands from which they were driven with such murderous cruelty.
It was here that I saw men working a deposit of that "white earth" which has done as much to bring American trade-enterprise into disrepute as glucose and oleomargerine put together. In itself a harmless, useless substance, it is used in immense quantities for "weighting" other articles and for general adulteration; and I could not help thinking that the man who owns the deposit must feel uncomfortably mean at times. But it is a paying concern, for the world is full of rascals ready to buy the stuff.
And, after all, one half the world lives by poisoning the other.
A thunderstorm broke over the country as we were passing through it, and I could not help admiring the sincerity of the Missouri rain. There was no reservation whatever about it, for it came down with a determined ferocity that made one think the clouds had a spite against the earth. Moss Ferry, a ragged, desolate hamlet, looked as if it was being drowned for its sins; and I sympathized with pretty Piedmont in the deluge that threatened to wash it away. But we soon ran out of the storm, and rattling past Gadshill, the scene of one of Jesse James' train-robbing exploits, and sped along through lovely scenery of infinite variety, and almost unbroken cultivation, to Arcadia.
But this is "civilization." In a few hours more I find myself back again at the Mississippi, the Indus of the West, and speeding along its bank with the Columbia bottom-lands lying rich and low on the other side of the prodigious river, and reminding me exactly of the great flat islands that you see lying in the Hooghly as you steam up to Calcutta—past the new parks which St. Louis is building for itself, and so, through the hideous adjuncts of a prosperous manufacturing town, into St. Louis itself.