Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/280

252 custom. Their equipages were fearfully and wonderfully made and drawn. Mostly rough carts set on clumsy wheels, without springs, some of them like huge dump-carts, with two wheels, unpainted, or the paint nearly all worn off, with here and there one with torn or faded and dirty covered top, and drawn by perhaps a span made by a mule and a horse, or a mule and a cow attached to the carriage, with harness of ropes, strings and leathers; they were most tempting, and probably few visitors shook the dust of Yorktown from their feet without having enjoyed a drive in a genuine Yorktown turn-out. How it brought to mind the ante bellum days! Could they have looked more ragged, dirty, stupid and hopelessly shiftless then than they do now? Some phenomenally enterprising ones came on board the Frances to sell newspapers. "Hyah ye'll git all the noos!" And so we could up to the 8th of October!

But all are impatient. The officers of the Governor's staff don their full dress uniforms and mount their handsome horses—poor creatures, they have been sea-sick too—that go galloping off with high-arched necks, wide-spread nostrils and fiery eyes, horses and riders looking very fine and grand, and quite equal to being as invincible at Yorktown as their forefathers were, should occasion arise.

A walk to see the town was proposed, and we left the queerly crowded wharf and took the road up over the small hill, along the straggling street. The sand, or rather the finely powdered, dusty soil, was inches deep along the road, and the sickly, yellow grass was smothered with it. The out-lying country is flat, monotonous and repulsive; the houses, mostly negro huts, many an one metamorphosed and become an hotel at present. Crowds of people, military, civilian and cosmopolitan, waded through the dirt. The stylishness of New York young ladies and the tawdriness of African belles blended in the curious stream of humanity.

They were literally gambling and drinking every where, in the so called hotels, in canvas tents, or with no attempt at concealment or cover, unabashed and unmolested by the roadside, in the very police head-quarters, where they looked askance at the blue uniforms. Hoe-cake was proposed, and the strollers betook themselves to a negro cabin teeming with vast numbers of children, whose pleasant-faced mistress professed herself delighted to make genuine Virginia hoe-cake for the party. It was made, and eaten with mild syrup and extravagant praises. Poetry aside, it tasted only like Indian meal mixed with water and baked in an over greased dish,—like a New Hampshire water bannock, in fact.

We learned in conversation that part of the multitudinous family were visiting friends from Philadelphia. The residents were evidently Roman Catholics, if one could judge from the character of various brilliantly colored prints on the walls, and there was a portrait of Pius the ninth, that would have astonished that worthy could he have chanced to have seen it.

Thoughts of Uncle Tom's cabin, of his last evening at his pleasant home when Chloe made the hoe-cakes for Mas'r George and Mose and Pete, of the prayer meeting held by the simple trusting people while poor Tom was being bargained away to the trader, came irresistibly into the mind, and "thank God that with all the disadvantages they must struggle against, with all their squalid poverty, they are at last free!" was the fervent, involuntary thanksgiving.

The sun was sinking, and the wide western horizon was a brilliant, glowing, cloudless red. The splendid color diffused itself through the dusky atmosphere, and in the peculiar light the strange crowd looked stranger still. With all its unsightly features, the scene appealed singularly to one's sense of the beautiful. There was an intense fascination in it, apart from its mere picturesqueness, as