I did not catch the answer.

We passed Port Hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the war—­the night-battle there between Farragut’s fleet and the Confederate land batteries, April 14th, 1863; and the memorable land battle, two months later, which lasted eight hours—­eight hours of exceptionally fierce and stubborn fighting—­and ended, finally, in the repulse of the Union forces with great slaughter.

Chapter 40 Castles and Culture

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 South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations—­vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance—­were in view.  And there was a tropical sun overhead 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 shore to 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 would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances.  The South has not 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 wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it.  It is pathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things—­materials all ungenuine 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 falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration-money to the building of something genuine.

Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly of 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 striking and beautiful architecture.  Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and ivy-mantled porches.’