Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty
thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has
a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories - in brief has
$1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways,
and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross
receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New
Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000.
Chapter 31 A Thumb-print and What Came of It
WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my
errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad - not
best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand.
The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me - now in one
form, now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:
is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little
sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and no
inquisitive eyes around. This settled it. Plain question and plain
answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed
best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their
disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main
argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface,
in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and AGREED
to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise
thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make TWO unwise things of
it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good
success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show
them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to
blame for it, I presently drifted into its history - substantially as
follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In
November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION, 1a, Karlstrasse;
but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow
who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children
used to drop in every morning and talk German to me - by request. One
day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two
establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the
doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance
state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six
corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted
boards, in three long rows - all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and
all of them wrapped in white shrouds.
