“Hurrah! hurrah! for the Old North State forever!
Hurrah! hurrah! for the good Old North State!”
Finally, I landed in Charleston, South Carolina, where I played Beauregard, but instead of firing bomb shells at Ft. Sumter, I fired soap bubbles at the heads and hearts of a magnificent audience of representative Charlestonians; and whether I pleased them or not, they were so generous and hospitable as to flatter me with occasional bombs of laughter and a few volleys of applause.
I swung back through Alabama to my home in Nashville, on hearing the news that the political sap was rising; but, alas! only to find that the Tennessee sugar tree was already tapped, you see, and that the senatorial sugar-trough was full of sap-suckers holding a snap caucus, and there was a lull and a laugh—I lulled and they laughed. When I awoke from my lull I kissed my wife and children good-bye, and broke for Texas, the queenly young sister of Tennessee, who took me in her arms, and brushing away my political tears, pressed me to her loving heart.
There is no state in the Union that gives a Tennesseean a warmer welcome than Texas, because her lap is full of Tennesseeans, and, moreover, she is naturally hospitable and kind. There is a place on her fat knee for every troubled soul, a kiss of sunshine on her lips and a lump of sugar in her hand for every weeping wanderer.
O, glorious empire state of the sun-kissed South, with thy hundred and seventy-five thousand square miles of as rich a country as was ever tickled by the plow or the pick, and as ever laughed a harvest of cotton and grain for the comfort and happiness of man! With thy cattle on a thousand hills, thy countless flocks, thy gushing wells of oil, thy fields of rice and sugar cane stretching far away like the sweet fields of Eden on the other side of Jordan! With thy fatness thou canst feed and warm the world! I wonder why the poor huddle in the smoke and filth of crowded cities when Texas smiles and beckons them to her landscapes of beauty, where the prairie flowers bloom and the sunshine plays with the zephyrs from the Gulf and sometimes scuffles with a cyclone. I wonder why toiling millions dwell amid blackened walls only to be slaves to heartless masters, when untouched fields invite the happy home and virgin soil still waits for the plowman and his merry song. I wonder why helpless children are doomed to die by thousands in polluted hovels and crowded alleys, when the green meadows of Texas bid them come and chase the butterflies among the bluebells and the daisies, and the blossoming hills call them hither to romp and play where the happy birds sing and the cows come home in the evening fragrant with the breath of alfalfa and the sweet wild grasses of the plains. Texas is a Paradise for the poor, it is a third heaven for the rich.
But I am about to forget that I was talking about my lecture tour. Let me see!—O, yes!—“All aboard for Nashville!” the conductor cries. Well, the rest of my story I will tell around the happy hearthstone of home.
FOOLISH DREAMERS.
It is a marvelous truth that this golden era of the world’s history has inspired no great poets that rank with Byron and Burns and Tom Moore and a long list of other immortals who have enriched literature with their songs; and it has developed but few prose writers worthy to wear the mantles of Blackstone and Kent in law, of Gibbon and Macaulay in history, and Scott and Bulwer in romance and fiction.
It is well we call it the golden era, for it is an era of commercialism, when men are trampling literature and art and music under their feet in the mad rush for gold and the gilded glory that it buys. To be a millionaire is greater in the estimation of modern worshipers of mammon than to be a Goldsmith; and a multimillionaire is greater in their gold-jaundiced eyes than a William Shakespeare. The highest aspiration of these nervous and strenuous generations is the acquirement and hoarding of gold. Religion is tinged with it. Politics is its ally—and alloy in the ratio of sixteen of gold to one of Patriotism. And most of the business and social relations of this enlightened age are purely golden and measured only by the circumference of a dollar. The English poet sounded the keynote of true philosophy when he sang: