“My father battled from Bunker Hill ’till the last Red Coat had left the land and then came here and began a new battle with the virgin forests of Vermont. And ever sence I was born and old enough to work, my sweat has watered this soil so dear to all of us. There’s not a foot of the cleared part of this old farm I have not worked over, and the whole of it is as sacred in my eyes as if it were a lordly estate handed down from scores of generations before me. The boys loved it as I do and liked to work over it. Now what does it all amount to? In a short time when I have passed over yender to join the rest on ’em, the old place will go into the hands of unfeeling strangers who’ll care no more about it than savages. Most likely they’ll rob the soil and skin it of the last spear of grass, and all these noble old trees that have been my friends sence I was a boy, will be cut down to feed the nearest sawmill. It’s astonishing, how mean most folks act toward natur! They treat her as though she had no rights and forgit all about the good things she gives us. But I suppose there is no good in sentiment if God is agin ye.”
His niece interrupted him gently: “Come away, uncle, you are nervous and excited and saying too much.”
“No, I’m not nervous or excited; I’m saying what I b’leve, and I want everybody to know it. Look at those graves holding all I had in the world, and no one had better, and then tell me if I have no cause to complain?”
TIM THE DISSIPATED
Very late in the year 1848—Christmas day, to be exact—I found myself in New Orleans, bankrupt in health and looking forward, hopelessly, to a seemingly not far off culmination of my earthly affairs. But, owing to the possession of a strong constitution, the good offices of kind friends, and careful medical treatment, I was enabled to disappoint the prophets and to evade the undertaker. By the time I had regained my feet, the balmy days of March had come around, and I improved the opportunity to make my duty-calls upon the kind-hearted friends who had taken an active interest in the welfare of a stranger who had been cast upon their shores. I found them wonderfully to my liking, generous, cordial, and frank, to a degree I had never dreamed of.
It was fortunate for me that I happened to become a denizen of that interesting old city during one of its better periods. Socially it was at high-water mark; the theatres were good and the French opera the better of all outside of Paris. In the winter it was the rendezvous for the well-to-do families of the whole far South. The rich cotton planters from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, and the sugar planters from along the “coast” came to this Southern metropolis, and brought with them their pretty daughters with their velvety voices, unaffected speech, garnished with its tint of African accent, and their frank, disingenuous ways; and also came their sons, who were not so fascinating, but were good fellows at heart—the majority of them—and, as a rule, save for one weakness, they were all right. But they had the unpleasant habit of “drawing at sight,” and to the credit of their alertness, I am compelled to record that they were apt to see very quick.
The presence of a large colony of well-to-do planters assisted to make New Orleans a very attractive winter resort. But they were not more given to pleasure than the average citizen of the place, who, as a rule, did not take life very seriously. He was in business, but not its slave, and each day brought with it its pleasurable recreation. With their peculiar and novel ways they were, to me, a revelation; the community made up of them seemed almost ideal, and had it not been for the presence of the slave and the slave market, the old French city, in its relation to a certain select few, could have passed for a kind of brick and mortar Arcadia.
Among the favorite recreations of that period was a drive down the shell road to Lake Ponchartrain, where there was a famous afternoon resort kept by Capt. Dan Hicox, a once famous “Captain on the Lakes,” a teller of good stories and fabricator of the best fish and game dinners and suppers to be found in the whole South. To say that his establishment was popular would give but a faint idea of the real conditions. Of a pleasant afternoon, in certain seasons of the year, nearly all that was jolliest and brightest in New Orleans society could be found sitting upon the captain’s piazzas, enjoying the breezes of the lake, which were usually tempered with something taken through a straw or drawn from the upper end of a bottle recently from the ice-chest.