‘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.

Chapter 45 Southern Sports

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—­