As an indication and natural justification of the most sanguine ideas of grape culture in Texas, we will state that the indigenous Mustang grape grows there spontaneously in great wasteful abundance, along the water-courses, on the uplands and upland "dry runs." There are cart-loads, car-loads, yes, steamboat loads of them growing wild over the country, and in different varieties. From this kind of grape are manufactured just those claret or sour wines most grateful to the tastes of people in hot climates.
It is thought by many good people in Texas, and as a temperance expedient too, that Providence hereby indicates what drinks, aside from water, are needful for the health and temperate habits of the country. The question is, why is the country so overstocked with this kind of grape? not by accident, or for mere ornament, certainly, nor for the use of bird or beast, for they touch them not, nor yet for table use, as no human tongue or lips would last long coming in contact with the powerful acid of the hull of this kind of grape. The pulp has a most delicious flavor, but can not be sucked from its dark inclosure without bringing with it the biting acid. There is no alternative; it was intended for man's use after being transformed into wine.
CHAPTER VI.
EFFECT OF CLIMATE ON TASTES AND APPETITES.
It is worthy of note and may be remarked that one's tastes and appetites undergo great changes in passing from a high northern clime to a southern; so much so that to his own surprise one finds himself literally accomplishing the experience of "loving what he once hated, and hating what he once loved." For example, buttermilk and clabber are delicious to the taste there; but few people ever think of them in the North except in association with food for swine. There, for convenience of using at meals, the milk fresh from the cow is first strained into bowls and tumblers, and then set aside and left stand for the cream to rise, and the hot weather, with or without thunder-storms, to inspissate the milk into clabber. Then it is brought on as the most delicious dish on the table, reserved as dessert for the last round, sprinkled with clean white sugar.
The difference of feeling, taste, appetite and temper we experience in changing climates is exactly measured by the isothermal difference of our latitudes. One may have a sweet platonic temper in the North, but in changing latitude ten or fifteen degrees southward, he will be surprised to find his temper tending to a change of ten or fifteen degrees also. And if he be a Christian he will be tempted at times to think divine grace not sufficient to preserve the peace between conscience and conduct. The reader will please note that we speak in these matters not from observation alone but with the authority of experience also.
We knew a minister of religion there, a recent import from the virtuous and platonic North, who had not been thoroughly mad for twenty years, and who possessed no little degree of self-complacency on the score of an invincible equanimity of temper; and his feeling had the merit of fact; so much so that once on a time, before his migration southward, one of his friends, observing his uniform evenness of temper, even in the midst of great provocation, and becoming irritated at his want of irritation, said to him: "Tell me, Sir, why is it that you don't get mad sometimes; your want of temper seems unmanly, unnatural, and savors of effeminacy, and reminds me to quote Shakespeare on you thus: You can 'smile, and smile, and be a villain still.' Don't refuse to express indignation on just occasion, but blow off the pent-up stuff; a little thunder now and then purifies a sultry atmosphere."
We saw this clerical specimen of "patience on a monument" one day suddenly lose his virtuous temper, and fall into a paroxysm of madness, and on slight provocation, quite fearful to behold, in which he poured out the vials of his wrath upon his friend, to the exhaustion of all decent epithets. Samson was shorn of his strength and left weak like another man, self-mortified beyond measure! Much we searched to know the cause of this sudden transformation, and while we wondered fancy heard a voice whisper, "The climate, the climate."