What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle.

From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear.  Shores lonely no longer.  Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks—­ standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.  A most home-like and happy-looking region.  And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees.  Here is testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago.  Mrs. Trollope says—­

’The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them.’

Captain Basil Hall—­

’The district of country which lies adjacent to the Mississippi, in the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery.

All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way.  The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day—­except as to the ‘trigness’ of the houses.  The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look.  It is the blight of the war.  Twenty-one years ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the ‘coast,’ just as it had been in 1827, as described by those tourists.

Unfortunate tourists!  People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same.  They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators—­or crocodiles, as she calls them—­ were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood-curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children.  The woman, by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator; but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides.  One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive—­but they were.  It is difficult, at this day, to understand, and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Capt.  Basil Hall got.

Chapter 41 The Metropolis of the South