Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/256

 a few days later I had a severe attack of the “break-bone fever,” an illness which by the sensations it causes does full justice to its ill-boding name. I thought I might fight the distemper by leaving New Orleans and visiting other parts in pursuit of my inquiries. I went to Mobile for the purpose of looking into the conditions of Southern Alabama, returned to New Orleans, and then ran up Bayou Teche in a government tug-boat as far as New Iberia, where I was literally driven back by clouds of mosquitoes of unusual ferocity. At New Orleans I dispatched an additional report to the President, and then, relentlessly harassed by the break-bone fever, which, as a physician advised me, I would not get rid of as long as I remained in that climate, I set my face northward, stopping at Natchez and Vicksburg to gather up some important information.

At Natchez I witnessed a significant spectacle. I was shown some large dwelling houses which, before the Civil War, had at certain seasons been occupied by families of the planting aristocracy of that region. Most of those houses now looked deserted and uncared for—shutters unhinged, windowpanes broken, yards and gardens covered with a rank growth of grass and weeds. In the front yard of one of the houses I observed some fresh stumps and stacks of cord-wood and an old man busy cutting down with an axe a magnificent shade tree. There was something distinguished in his appearance that arrested my attention—fine features topped with long, white locks; slender, delicate hands; clothes shabby, but of a cut denoting that they had originally been made for a person above the ordinary wood-chopper. My companion, a Federal captain, did not know him. I accosted him with the question to whom that house belonged. “It belongs to me,” he said. I begged his pardon for asking the further question why he was cutting