“Luther Williams and Nick Nolan were sentenced to imprisonment for ninety days for connection with the lynching, and Jeremiah Gibson, the jailer, Henry Padgett and William Mayers, all of Chattanooga, for sixty days.”

IV
RHETORIC IN LOUISVILLE

Louisville, Kentucky, is not an attractive city. It is as flat as my hand; its atmosphere is grimy; its buildings vary from the commonplace to the mean. It has one or two of the dumpy sky-scrapers—only some ten or twelve storeys high—which are indispensable to the self-respect of every American city of a certain size; but one feels that they are products of mere imitative ostentation, not of economic necessity. In Louisville the names, or numbers, of the streets are scarcely ever stuck up. It is characteristic of a half-grown American town that you can generally read the names of streets which have no houses in them; but when the houses are built, the name-boards seem to be thrown away.

I am apt to estimate the civilization of a city by inspecting its book-stores; but during a long day in Louisville I could not find a single one. No doubt I failed to look in the right place; but I certainly perambulated the leading business streets. I was reminded of a couplet from I know not what poet—

“Alas for the South! Her books have grown fewer;

She was never much given to literature.”

Let me hasten to add that in all the other cities I visited I found one or more fairly well-supplied book-stores.

For reasons I have elsewhere stated at length, an American barber’s shop is an abomination to me. |Tonsorial Sarcasm.| Among the least of its terrors is the interminable time occupied by the disgusting processes to which you are submitted. However, I had time on my hands in Louisville, and, being a vagrant with no fixed abode, had no conveniences for shaving myself. So I ventured into a “tonsorial parlour.”

I was “attended” by a white “artist”; for this is one of the trades from which the negro is being rapidly ousted all over the South.[[11]]

“Have you special seats for coloured people in the street-cars here”? I asked my torturer.