Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Roundabout PapersI do, pone me pigris campis: smother me in a desert, orlet Mississippi or Garonne drown me! At that comfortabletavern on Pontchartrain we had a bouillabaisse thanwhich a better was never eaten at Marseilles: and notthe least headache in the morning, I give you my word;on the contrary, you only wake with a sweet refreshingthirst for claret and water. They say there is fever therein the autumn: but not in the spring-time, when thepeach-blossoms blush over the orchards, and the sweetherbs come to flavor the juleps.I was bound from New Orleans to Saint Louis; and ourwalk was constantly on the Levee, whence we could seea hundred of those huge white Mississippi steamers attheir moorings in the river: “Look,” said my friendLochlomond to me, as we stood one day on the quay—”look at that post! Look at that coffee-house behind it!Sir, last year a steamer blew up in the river yonder, justwhere you see those men pulling off in the boat. Bythat post where you are standing a mule was cut in twoby a fragment of the burst machinery, and a bit of thechimney-stove in that first-floor window of the coffeehouse,killed a negro who was cleaning knives in thetop-room!” I looked at the post, at the coffee-housewindow, at the steamer in which I was going to embark,at my friend, with a pleasing interest not divested ofmelancholy. Yesterday, it was the mule, thinks I, whowas cut in two: it may be cras mihi. Why, in the samelittle sketch-book, there is a drawing of an Alabamariver steamer which blew up on the very next voyageafter that in which your humble servant was on board!Had I but waited another week, I might have …. Theseincidents give a queer zest to the voyage down the lifestreamin America. When our huge, tall, white, pasteboardcastle of a steamer began to work up stream,every limb in her creaked, and groaned, and quivered,so that you might fancy she would burst right off. Wouldshe hold together, or would she split into ten million ofshivers? O my home and children! Would your humbleservant’s body be cut in two across yonder chain on theLevee, or be precipitated into yonder first-floor, so as todamage the chest of a black man cleaning boots at thewindow? The black man is safe for me, thank goodness.154