BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so;like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures.

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.

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