‘Coughing, etc.’  The ‘etc.’ stands for an unpleasant word there, a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints.  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.  Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed, in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick or absent.  The Government furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting and tending.  A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month.

The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever.  The island has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate.  No signs left of the wreck of the ‘Pennsylvania.’  Some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised.

We were getting down now into the migrating negro region.  These poor people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for the privation now.  They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out.  Not for any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to be moving.  The amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them.  If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty.  If not, a shorter flight will do.