AFTER twenty-one years'absence,I felt a very strong desire to see the river again,and the steamboats,and such of the boys as might be left;so I resolved to go out there.
I enlisted a poet for company,and a stenographer to 'take him down,'and started westward about the middle of April.
As I proposed to make notes,with a view to printing,I took some thought as to methods of procedure.
I reflected that if I were recognized,on the river,I should not be as free to go and come,talk,inquire,and spy around,as I should be if unknown;I remembered that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies,and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts:so I concluded,that,from a business point of view,it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names.
The idea was certainly good,but it bred infinite bother;for although Smith,Jones,and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them,it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted.
How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind?
This is a great mystery.I was innocent;and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed;and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me,I could never have kept the name by me at all.
We left per Pennsylvania Railroad,at 8A.M.April 18.
'EVENING.Speaking of dress.Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York.'
I find that among my notes.It makes no difference which direction you take,the fact remains the same.
Whether you move north,south,east,or west,no matter:you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come,by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--I do not mean of the women alone,but of both sexes.
It may be that CARRIAGE is at the bottom of this thing;and I think it is;for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York;yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact:the educated eye never mistakes those people for New-Yorkers.No,there is a godless grace,and snap,and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mere clothing cannot effect.
'APRIL 19.This morning,struck into the region of full goatees-sometimes accompanied by a mustache,but only occasionally.'
It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely fashion;it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation.
The goatee extends over a wide extent of country;and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation,which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists.
'AFTERNOON.At the railway stations the loafers carry BOTHhands in their breeches pockets;it was observable,heretofore,that one hand was sometimes out of doors,--here,never.
This is an important fact in geography.'
If the loafers determined the character of a country,it would be still more important,of course.
'Heretofore,all along,the station-loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot;here,these remains of activity are wanting.
This has an ominous look.'
By and by,we entered the tobacco-chewing region.
Fifty years ago,the tobacco-chewing region covered the Union.
It is greatly restricted now.
Next,boots began to appear.Not in strong force,however.
Later--away down the Mississippi--they became the rule.
They disappeared from other sections of the Union with the mud;no doubt they will disappear from the river villages,also,when proper pavements come in.
We reached St.Louis at ten o'clock at night.At the counter of the hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name,with a miserable attempt at careless ease.The clerk paused,and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances;then he said--
'It's all right;I know what sort of a room you want.
Used to clerk at the St.James,in New York.'
An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career.We started to the supper room,and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere.
How odd and unfair it is:wicked impostors go around lecturing under my NOM DE GUERRE and nobody suspects them;but when an honest man attempts an imposture,he is exposed at once.
One thing seemed plain:we must start down the river the next day,if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate:an unpalatable disappointment,for we had hoped to have a week in St.Louis.
The Southern was a good hotel,and we could have had a comfortable time there.It is large,and well conducted,and its decorations do not make one cry,as do those of the vast Palmer House,in Chicago.
True,the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period,and the cues and balls of the Post-Pliocene;but there was refreshment in this,not discomfort;for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities.
The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room,was the absence of the river man.If he was there he had taken in his sign,he was in disguise.I saw there none of the swell airs and graces,and ostentatious displays of money,and pompous squanderings of it,which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd in the bygone days,in the thronged billiard-rooms of St.Louis.
In those times,the principal saloons were always populous with river men;given fifty players present,thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from the river.But I suspected that the ranks were thin now,and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy.Why,in my time they used to call the 'barkeep'Bill,or Joe,or Tom,and slap him on the shoulder;I watched for that.But none of these people did it.
