Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/496

 488 long, light, lofty, and elegantly furnished; rich carpets, soft lounges, huge mirrors, cut glass chandeliers, pictured panels, marble tables, vases, of flowers, pianoforte—everything to give repose or promote enjoyment. I was shown to a large and thoroughly furnished state room, as comfortable as any bed-chamber need be.

The tables were set for breakfast from eight to ten o’clock, and every one ordered what he required from a printed bill of fare, containing a great variety of dishes. It was a Southern boat, and the negro waiters were perfectly trained to their duties. They spring to anticipate your wishes, they gently suggest some favourite dish, they seem delighted to make your meal agreeable.

After breakfast there is the promenade on deck, with the ever-changing panorama of river scenery; the lounge on the balconies, with the new friend or novel; a game of chess or cards in the saloon, or music. So we glide along till the early dinner at three o’clock. This sumptuous meal is served up with all the formalities. Oval tables are set across the saloon, each table for twelve persons. Every name is written upon a card, and placed beside his plate. A careful clerk has assorted the whole company with the nicest care. Each table has its own party of persons suitable to each other. The courses come on in due order, with all the luxuries of fish, flesh, and fowl, and an admirable dessert. Tea and supper are served at seven o’clock, and after the tables are cleared the waiters, who are all musicians, play an hour of quadrilles, waltzes, &c., and the passengers dance if they are so inclined. Then music and conversation grow lively aft, and cards still livelier forward. One passage fee pays all expenses. No waiter expects a fee. The only extras are boots and porter. At the end of a long trip, ladies usually give a small gratuity to the chambermaid.

On a high, bold bluff, we descry two miles of handsome buildings, and our boat rounds to, so as to bring her head up stream, and in a few moments we land at Memphis. The shore is thronged with hacks and porters. The hotels are not half a mile away, and the fare demanded is the modest sum of ten shillings. The Southerners are devoted to free trade. I have known New Orleans cabmen to ask and get five pounds for taking a load of passengers a few rods. It was late at night, and in rather a heavy shower: in fact the rain amounted to an inundation, and the water in the streets was two feet deep. The excuse for high fares at Memphis was, that it was muddy.

There was no mistake about that. The streets are broad, the side walks well laid, the buildings fine, but the streets had never been paved, and the stumps of the forest trees were in some of the public squares. Paving was a difficulty. In the alluvial valley of the Mississippi stone is rare. Flag stones for the side walks are imported from Liverpool, as ballast to the cotton ships. The clay loam of the finest streets of Memphis was cut into ruts, two feet deep, by the mule teams and waggons which brought the cotton from the railways to the river.

How beautiful the city was, how lovely the country, with its villas, gardens, and flowering and fragrant forests around it, I cannot describe. The soil is rich; the climate bright and genial. Roses bloom all the winter in the gardens. Cotton and maize grow abundantly in their season. Money is plentiful; wages are high; there is work for all in that land of plenty: so it was before the war. I have travelled a thousand miles and never seen one hand held out for charity.

In the long and almost perpetual summers of the South, ice is a luxury of the first order. Every morning the ice cart comes round as regularly as milkman or baker: it is seen on every table. Stored in great warehouses, built with double walls, filled in with spent tanbark or sawdust, it is made to last from year to year, even in a climate where the thermometer ranges for weeks at nearly a hundred degrees. But whence comes the ice? A thousand miles up the river the winters are long and cold. The ice, two feet in thickness, is cut out in blocks, and stored up for the opening of navigation. Loaded in immense flat-boats or rafts of boards, it floats down with the current, to Memphis. Two men, on each flat-boat, keep the frail craft in mid-channel, signal the steam-boats that might run them down, and lazily while away the weeks of this slow and tedious voyage. Mr. Lincoln, the present President of the United States, is said to have been engaged at one time in navigating in this manner the very river down which he is now sending his victorious gun-boats.

If Memphis needs ice to cool her liquids, she needs also fuel to roast and boil. The steam-boats and locomotives have burnt off the forests, but there is an abundance of coal around the sources of the Ohio. You see it in seams, ten feet in thickness, cropping out of the high banks of the Monongahela, needing only to be picked out and sent down a broad trough to the flat-boat by the shore. The coal floats down with the current like the ice, a thousand or two thousand miles, and lights the grates and furnaces of Memphis and New Orleans. Many cargoes are lost. Sometimes the mere swell of a passing steamer sinks the frail flat-boat; sometimes a sudden hurricane will sink a hundred, and many lives are lost.

The first Sunday spent in a gay southern city is a curious social revelation. You walk out toward evening, the sky is blue, the air is balm, but a thousand rainbows of gay and flashing colours have broken loose; all negrodom has put on its wonderful attire of finery, and come out to take the air. Slavery has its fascinations, and one of these is to see the whole negro population of a rich city like Memphis out on a Sunday afternoon. The negroes not only outdo the whites in dress, but they caricature their manners; and sable belles and sooty exquisites appropriate the finest walks, and interpret the comedy of life in their own fashion.

There is a handsome theatre at Memphis, very fashionably attended when there are attractive stars. The coloured population, of course, is suitably provided for, and takes an intense satisfaction in the drama. The negroes are, perhaps, even more fond of the circus; and I have seen a full gallery noisily enjoying the make-believe negro minstrels. But the circus, with its trained