The magnolia-trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant,with their dense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms.
The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it,because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly in the Southat last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered togetherin the middle distance--were in view. And there was a tropical sunoverhead and a tropical swelter in the air.
And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise:
a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shoreto shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.
Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building;for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle wouldever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a coupleof generations ago, with his medieval romances. The South hasnot yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books.
Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here,in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesomeand practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factoriesand locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and otherwindy humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough,that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials allungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place;but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehoodundergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when itwould have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitablefire began, and then devote this restoration-money to the buildingof something genuine.
Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopolyof them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female Institute'
of Columbia; Tennessee. The following remark is from the same advertisement--'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of strikingand beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblanceto the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls,and ivy-mantled porches.'
Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keepinghotel in a castle.
By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough;but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age romanticismhere in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatestand worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarilya hurtful thing and a mistake.
Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.'
Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it inthat unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity,it seems to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter, and means the same thing: that is, if either phrasemeans anything at all--'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education,and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment,and with the exception of those born in Europe were born and raisedin the south. Believing the southern to be the highest type ofcivilization this continent has seen,' the young[Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser:
KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutesafter ten o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor,and Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., were killed in a shooting affray.
The difficulty began yesterday afternoon by General Mabryattacking Major O'Connor and threatening to kill him.
This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabrythat it was not the place to settle their difficulties.
Mabry then told O'Connor he should not live.
It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not.
The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transferof some property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoonMabry sent word to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight.
This morning Major O'Connor was standing in the door ofthe Mechanics' National Bank, of which he was president.
General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay Street onthe opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the bank,got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired.
Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. As he fellO'Connor fired again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh.
O'Connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun.
About this time Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., son of General Mabry,came rushing down the street, unseen by O'Connor until withinforty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the shot takingeffect in O'Connor's right breast, passing through the body nearthe heart. The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired,the load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side.
Mabry fell pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantlyO'Connor fell dead without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise,but fell back dead. The whole tragedy occurred withintwo minutes, and neither of the three spoke after he was shot.
General Mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body.
A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot,and another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had theirclothing pierced by buckshot. The affair caused great excitement,and Gay Street was thronged with thousands of people.
General Mabry and his son Joe were acquitted only a fewdays ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don Lusby,father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago.
Will Mabry was killed by Don Lusby last Christmas. Major ThomasO'Connor was President of the Mechanics' National Bank here,and was the wealthiest man in the State.--ASSOCIATED PRESSTELEGRAM.
One day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville,Tenn., Female College, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told thathis brother-in-law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him.
Burton, t seems, had already killed one man and driven his knifeinto another. The Professor armed himself with a double-barreledshot gun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, foundhim playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out.
The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course metwith pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the lawwas powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment,to protect him, he protected himself.
About the same time, two young men in North Carolina quarreledabout a girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged.
Friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains.
On the 24th the young men met in the public highway.
One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the other an ax.
The man with the club fought desperately for his life, but itwas a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blowsent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next momenthe was a dead man.
About the same time, two 'highly connected' young Virginians,clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while 'skylarking,'
came to blows. Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads's eyes;Roads demanded an apology; Dick refused to give it, and itwas agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose;the parties had no pistols, and it was too late at nightto procure them. One of them suggested that butcher-kniveswould answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion;the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gashin his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal.
If Dick has been arrested, the news has not reached us.
He 'expressed deep regret,' and we are told by a Stauntoncorrespondent of the PHILADELPHIA PRESS that 'every effort hasbeen made to hush the matter up.'--EXTRACTS FROM THE PUBLICJOURNALS.]> ladies are trained according to the southern ideasof delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety;hence we offer a first-class female college for the south andsolicit southern patronage.'
What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that,probably blows it from a castle.
From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations borderboth sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-widelevels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear.
Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way,on both banks--standing so close together, for long distances,that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sortof spacious street. A most home-like and happy-looking region.
And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house,embowered in trees. Here is testimony of one or two of the processionof foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago.
Mrs. Trollope says--'The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvariedfor many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto,the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen,and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them.'
Captain Basil Hall--'The district of country which lies adjacent to the Mississippi,in the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thicklypeopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas,trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat,gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery.
All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way.
The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a wordchanged in order to exactly describe the same region as itappears to-day--except as to the 'trigness' of the houses.
The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many,possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white,have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look.
It is the blight of the war. Twenty-one years ago everything wastrim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had beenin 1827, as described by those tourists.
Unfortunate tourists! People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies,and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same.
They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators--or crocodiles, as she calls them--were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood-curdlingaccount of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squattercabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children. The woman,by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator;but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides.
One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive--but they were. It is difficult, at this day, to understand,and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave,honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Capt. BasilHall got. Mrs. Trollope's account of it may perhaps entertain the reader;therefore I have put it in the Appendix.
Castles and Culture
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