‘Give me something for lagniappe.’
The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit
of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar
or a spool of thread, gives the governor—I
don’t know what he gives the governor; support,
likely.
When you are invited to drink, and this does occur
now and then in New Orleans—and you say,
‘What, again?—no, I’ve had enough;’
the other party says, ‘But just this one time
more—this is for lagniappe.’
When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments
a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady’s
countenance that the edifice would have been better
with the top compliment left off, he puts his ’I
beg pardon—no harm intended,’ into
the briefer form of ’Oh, that’s for lagniappe.’
If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills
a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says
‘For lagniappe, sah,’ and gets you another
cup without extra charge.
In the North one hears the war mentioned, in
social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often
as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk,
it has long ago been relieved of duty. There
are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner
company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen
that four of them—and possibly five—were
not in the field at all. So the chances are
four to two, or five to one, that the war will at
no time during the evening become the topic of conversation;
and the chances are still greater that if it become
the topic it will remain so but a little while.
If you add six ladies to the company, you have added
six people who saw so little of the dread realities
of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them
years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic
if you brought it up.
The case is very different in the South. There,
every man you meet was in the war; and every lady
you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief
topic of conversation. The interest in it is
vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is
fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull
company and set their tongues going, when nearly any
other topic would fail. In the South, the war
is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it.
All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as
having happened since the waw; or du’in’
the waw; or befo’ the waw; or right aftah the
waw; or ‘bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten
yeahs befo’ the waw or aftah the waw.
It shows how intimately every individual was visited,
in his own person, by that tremendous episode.
It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea
of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion
is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside.
At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and
said, in an aside—
