that you couldn’t give away; and get your
embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a
couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred—that’s
what he’s worth. There ain’t
anything equal to it but trading rats for di’monds
in time of famine. Well, don’t you see,
when there’s an epidemic, people don’t
wait to embam. No, indeed they don’t; and
it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say—hurts
it like hell-th, health, see?—Our little
joke in the trade. Well, I must be going.
Give me a call whenever you need any—I
mean, when you’re going by, sometime.’
In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating
himself, if any has been done. I have not enlarged
on him.
With the above brief references to inhumation, let
us leave the subject. As for me, I hope to be
cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once,
who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive
manner—
‘I wouldn’t worry about that, if I had
your chances.’ Much he knew about it—the
family all so opposed to it.
The old French part of New Orleans—anciently
the Spanish part—bears no resemblance to
the American end of the city: the American end
which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center.
The houses are massed in blocks; are austerely plain
and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here and there
a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered
on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed
verandas running along the several stories. Their
chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain
with which time and the weather have enriched the
plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings,
and has as natural a look of belonging there as has
the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration
cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be
found elsewhere in America.
The iron railings are a specialty, also. The
pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and
airy and graceful—with a large cipher or
monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling,
intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient
railings are hand-made, and are now comparatively
rare and proportionately valuable. They are become
bric-A-brac.
The party had the privilege of idling through this
ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South’s
finest literary genius, the author of ’the Grandissimes.’
In him the South has found a masterly delineator of
its interior life and its history. In truth,
I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant
mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of
it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by
personal contact with it.
With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe
and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old
quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a
vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things—vivid,
and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features,
but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly
through the vision of the imagination: a case,
as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing
the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired
and enlightened long-sighted native.
