You Will Find It In The Following Description Of A Steamboat
Dinner Which She Ate In Company With A Lot Of Aristocratic Planters;
Wealthy, Well-Born, Ignorant Swells They Were, Tinselled With The Usual
Harmless Military And Judicial Titles Of That Old Day Of Cheap Shams And
Windy Pretense -
'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious
rapidity with which the viands were seized
And devoured; the strange
uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the
contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our
dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the
whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful
manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced
us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and
majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything
rather than an hour of enjoyment.'
Chapter 30 Sketches by the Way
IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere, and
very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land,
flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in
places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work
gone to ruin, and all to be done over again, with straitened means and a
weakened courage. A melancholy picture, and a continuous one; - hundreds
of miles of it. Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet
deep, in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without
farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that the
keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge
his trust, - and often in desperate weather.
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