Life on the Mississippi
hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large
scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The
traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the
required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls
the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field,
between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot
and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson
river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it,
that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in
air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea,
and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it.
The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and
fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand
trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific
fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it
lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's
crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last
year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific
methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons,
to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was
in my time.
The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little
crabs--'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction
whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs;
for they bore into the levees, and ruin them.
The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and
filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar
is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the
centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the
evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to
remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the
molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through
the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have
jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and
easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the
most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to
impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for
a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men
in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it.
We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain
Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed
between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted
useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be
covered up and invisible.
We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,'
which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all
communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings
and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with
the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede.
We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited
time, we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was
a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental
and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot,
whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always
this-worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance of
the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a
machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it.
He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song.
He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again from
a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load
of such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of
discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so
delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy.
Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and
gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along, and I learned from
them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends
during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer
for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been
receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a
New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by
distance: from the local post-office in Paradise to New York, five
dollars; from New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr.
Manchester very well. I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple
of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This
uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half
a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked
a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and
sixty-five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance
just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr.
Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr.
Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair
example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the
way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came
from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I
owe him an apology--
QUESTION. Where are you?
ANSWER. In the spirit world.
Q. Are you happy?
A. Very happy. Perfectly happy.
Q. How do you amuse yourself?
A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits.
Q. What else?
A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary.
Q. What do you talk about?
A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth,
and how to influence them for their good.
Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall
you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are?
No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous
questions.
Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in
frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious
about frivolous questions upon the subject?
No reply.
Q. Would you like to come back?
A. No.
Q. Would you say that under oath?
A. Yes.
Q. What do you eat there?
A. We do not eat.
Q. What do you drink?
A. We do not drink.
Q. What do you smoke?
A. We do not smoke.
Q. What do you read?
A. We do not read.
Q. Do all the good people go to your place?
A. Yes.
Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it,
in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other
place.
A. No reply.
Q. When did you die?
A. I did not die, I passed away.
Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have you been in
the spirit land?
A. We have no measurements of time here.
Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in
your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your
former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for.
You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true?
A. Yes.
Q. Then name the day of the month.
(Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by
violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time.
Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such
things being without importance to them.)
Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to
the spirit land?
This was granted to be the case.
Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it?
(More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium.
Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the
year.)
Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last
question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail
to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting,
since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did
you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe?
A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) _Natural death_.
This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his
relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary
intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great
pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for
his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the
amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there.
This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receives letters from
spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them
all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are
filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a
tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One
of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally
describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how to contrive an
improved railway car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it
is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy
we are.'
CHAPTER 49
Episodes in Pilot Life
IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five
of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming
as an occupation. Of course this was not because they were peculiarly
gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than
in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some
other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is
private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the
pilot-house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a
thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling
lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to
themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at
such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and
peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn,
and at last enjoy.
But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished
anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them: they
support their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from the river
annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next
frost. Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out
of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way
he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural
season. So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's
slave the hardest half of the year.
One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. He knew a
trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by
applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into
the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every
three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third.
But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. The expert
explained that his share was not reached. The farm produced only two
loads.
Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--the outcome