'Man he look skeerd. He up en 'low, he did, "W'at de name er goodness I gwine do?" 5" "Well, den,' sez ole Jedge Rabbit, sezee, ax 'er ef she kin keep house. She 'll say yasser. Ax 'er ef she kin cook. She'll say yasser. Ax er ef she kin scour. Ax 'er ef she kin wash yasser. Ax 'er ef she kin milk de red cow. Den see w'at she say." Man, he 'low, he did, dat he mighty much erbleege ter ole Jedge Rabbit, en wid wat he make he bow en tuck he leaf. He went home, he did, en w'en he git dar, sho' 'nuff dar wuz dish yer nice-lookin' gal a pommynadin' up en down de road, en shakin' 'er hankcher. Man, he hail 'er, he did, en ax 'er how she come on. She 'low she purty well, en how do he do Man say he feelin' sort er po'ly. Den she up en ax 'im w'at de matter. Man say he 'speck he feel po'ly kaze he so powerful lonesome. Den dish yer nice-lookin' gal, she ax 'im w'at make he so powerful lonesome. Man he say he 'speck he so powerful lonesome kase he want ter marry. Time de man come out so flat-footed 'bout marryin', de gal, she 'gun ter work wid 'er fan, en chaw at 'er hankcher. Den, atter w'ile, she up en ax 'im who he 'Jedge Rabbit look at de man sort er like he takin' pity on 'im, en den he tuk he cane en make a mark in de ashes. Den 25 he ax de man how ole is dish yer great gal. Man tol' 'im. Jedge Rabbit make 'n'er mark in de ashes. Den he ax de man is she got cat eyes. Man sort er study 'bout dis, but he say he 'speck she 30 is. Jedge Rabbit make 'n'er mark. Den he ax is 'er years peaked at de top. Man 'low he disremember, but he speck dey is. Jedge Rabbit make 'n'er mark in de ashes. Den he ax is she got yaller ha'r. Man 35 wan' ter marry. Man 'low he ain't no say she is. Jedge Rabbit make 'n'er mark. Den he ax is 'er toofs sharp. Man say dey is. Jedge Rabbit make 'n'er mark. Atter he done ax all dis, Jedge Rabbit got up, he did en went 'cross de room ter 40 de lookin'-glass. W'en he see hisse'f in dar, he tuck 'n shet one eye, s-l-o-w. Den he sot down en leant back in de cheer, en 'low, sezee: "I done had de idee in my head dat 45 ole Mizzle-Mazzle done moof out 'n de country, en yit yer she is gallopin' 'roun' des ez natchul ez a dead pig in de sunshine!" Man look 'stonish, but he ain't say 50 nuthin'. Jedge Rabbit keep on talkin'. "You ain't never bin trouble' wid no trouble yit, but ef you wan' ter be trouble' wid trouble dat 's double en thribble trouble, you des go en marry ole Mizzle- 55 Mazzle," sezee. "You nee'nter b'lieve me less 'n you wan' ter," sezee. "Des go 'long en marry 'er." sezee. ways 'tickler, kase he des want somebody Wid Law!" sez she, "does you speck I'm a-gwine ter let dat cow hook me?" Man, he say de cow des ez gentle ez a dog. "Does you speck I'm a-gwine ter let dat cow kick me crank-sided?" sez she. 'Man, he 'low, he did, dat de cow won't kick, but dat ar gal she tuck 'n make mo skuses dan dey is frogs in de spring branch, but bimeby she say she kin try. But she 'low dat fus' 'fo' she try dat she 'll show 'im how she kin keep house. So the nex' mornin' yer she come, en I let you I know she sailed in dar; en sot dat house ter rights 'fo' some wimmen folks kin tu'n 'roun'. Man, he say, he did, dat she do dat mighty nice. 'Nex' day, de gal sot in en got dinner. Man say, he did, dat dey ain't nobody w'at kin beat dat dinner. Nex' day, she sot in 1o en scoured, en she make that flo' shine same ez a lookin'-glass. Man, he say dey ain't nobody in dat neighborhoods kin beat dat scourin'. Nex' day, she come fer ter milk de red cow, en de man, he 'low ter 15 hisse'f, he did, dat he gwine ter see w'at make she don't like ter milk dat cow. 'De gal come, she did, en git de milkpiggin', en scald it out, en den she start fer de cow-lot. Man, he crope 'long atter 20 de gal fer ter watch 'er. Gal went on, en w'en she come ter de lot dar wuz de red cow stan'in' in de fence-cornder wallopin' 'er cud. Gal, she sorter shuck de gate, she did, en holler, "Sook, cow! Sook, cow!" 25 Cow, she pearten up at dat, kaze she know w'en folks call 'er dat away, she gwine ter come in fer a bucket er slops. 'She pearten up, de red cow did, en start todes de gate, but, gentermens! time 30 she smell dat gal, she 'gun a blate like she smell blood, en paw'd de groun' en shuck 'er head des like she fixin' fer ter make fight. Man, he 'low ter hisse'f dat dish 5 yer kinder business mighty kuse, en he keep on watchin'. Gal, she open de gate, but stiddier de cow makin' fight, she 'gun ter buck. Gal, she say, So, cow! so, cow, so!' but de cow she hist her tail in de elements, en run 'roun' dat lot like de dogs wuz atter 'er. Gal, she foller on, en hit sorter look like she gwine ter git de cow hemmed up in a cornder, but de cow ain't got no notion er dis, en bimeby she whirl en make a splunge at de gal, en ef de gal had n't er lipt de fence quick es she did de cow would er got 'er. Ez she lipt de fence, de man seed 'er foots, en, lo en beholes, dey wuz wolf foots! Man, he holler out: "You oughter w'ar shoes w'en you come a-milkin' de red cow!" en wid dat, de old Witch-Wolf gun a twist, en fetched a yell, en made 'er disappearance in de elements.' Here Uncle Remus paused awhile. Then he shook his head, and exclaimed: 'Tain't no use! Dey may fool folks, but cows knows wil' creeturs by der smell.' (1889) LAFCADIO HEARN (1850-1904) No other author of America, not even Mark Twain or Joaquin Miller, had a more picturesque career or possessed a more puzzling personality than Lafcadio Hearn. Son of an Irish soldier and a Grecian mother, born on Leucadia, the Ionian island of Sappho, he passed a part of his boyhood with an aunt in Ireland and a part of it in France and in England where he was educated for the priesthood. At sixteen, however, he ran away, spent three obscure years in the London underworld, made his way to New York at nineteen, and later, drifting westward, worked for a time on the Cincinnati Enquirer. In 1877 he was in New Orleans, a reporter, pouring his eager, De Quincey-like dreamings into the city papers, and then, after a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico, publishing in the Times-Democrat his Torn Letters, which afterwards in 1888 were to appear in Harper's Monthly as Chita. From New Orleans, restless and excited, he drifted on to the Windward Islands where he wrote his Two Years in the French West Indies, then on to New York, and then, commissioned by the Harpers, on to Japan where he spent the rest of his life, marrying a Japanese wife, adopting the Bhuddist religion, and taking out naturalization papers as a citizen of the empire. No other American has so filled his pages with color and sensation and florid impressionism as Hearn. His books, like Chita for instance. are a series of lurid pictures and intense sensuous impressions. It leaps and bounds, it chokes with tropic heat, it blazes with the sunsets of the Mexican gulf, it stagnates with torrid siestas, it is raucous with the voices of tropic insects and birds. It is incoherent. rhapsodic, half picture, half suggestion - materials rather than final structure. Later he did for Japan what he had done for the American tropics. It was something unique in English literature, for no other occidental has ever entered so completely into the soul of oriental life or has succeeded in so clearly interpreting it to the western world. His most enduring work undoubtedly is to be found in these Japanese studies, but his most thrilling and beautiful and intense books are those of his first inspiration, those colorful and moving pictures of the western tropics. swans. But the miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips into some canal5 mouth, labors along the artificial channel awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating machine; but whichever of the five different routes be pursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through somber mazes of swamp-forest,- past assemblages of cypresses all hoary with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal or bayou, from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and sometimes the Traveling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the 10 trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some of those light, narrow steamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receive passengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint- 15 Louis Street, hard by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking of steam-craft — all striving for place to rest their white breasts against the levée, side by side,-like great weary zo 1 Reprinted from Chita: A Memory of Last Is land, by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, the owner of the copyright. Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the Indes. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to inspire any statuary,- beautiful with the beauty of ruddy 5 bronze,- gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them. . . . Farther seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some queer camp of wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform that stands above the water upon a thousand piles; - over the miniature wharf you can scarcely fail to observe a white signboard painted with crimson ideographs. The great platform is used for drying fish in 5 the sun; and the fantastic characters of the sign, literally translated, mean: 'Heap - Shrimp -- Plenty.' And finally all the land melts down into desolations of sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by the melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea touches the bass keys of his mighty organ. swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of reptile voices chanting in cadence, rhythmically surging in a stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,- a monstrous and appalling chorus of frogs! Panting, screaming, scraping her bot- 10 tom over the sand-bars,- all day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue open water below the marsh lands; and perhaps she may be fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset. For the sake of passengers, she travels by day only; but there are other vessels which make the journey also by night threading the bayou-labyrinths winter and summer: sometimes steering 20 by the North Star,- sometimes feeling the way with poles in the white season of fogs, sometimes, again, steering by that Star of Evening which on our sky glows like another moon, and drops over the 25 silent lakes as she passes a quivering trail of silver fire. -- Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you into thin bluish lines; —land and water alike take 30 more luminous color; - bayous open into broad passes; - lakes link themselves the ocean-wind 35 with sea-bays; — and bursts upon you,- keen, cool, and full of light. For the first time the vessel begins to swing, rocking to the great living pulse of the tides. And gazing from the deck around you, with no forest walls to break the view, it will seem to you that the low land must have once been rent 40 asunder by the sea, and strewn about the Gulf in fantastic tatters. Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an oasis emerging,a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with 45 the rounded foliage of evergreen oaks:a chénière. And from the shining flood also kindred green knolls arise,- pretty islets, each with its beach girdle of dazzling sand and shells, yellow-white,- and 50 all radiant with semi-tropical foliage, myrtle and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Under their emerald shadows curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing, where dwell a swarthy population of Ori- 55 entals, Malay fishermen, who speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own Tagal, and perpetuate in II Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel by steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain to enter the Gulf by the Grande Pass - skirting Grande Terre, the most familiar island of all, not so much because of its proximity as because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos; the stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is bleakly uninteresting a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decaying things, worm-riddled tinibers, dead porpoises. Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of the light-house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above which rise the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustations of oyster shells. Around all the gray circling of a sharkhaunted sea. Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven flames like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are flying in one wild rout of broken gold, - you may see the tawny grasses all cov ered with something like husks,— wheatcolored husks, large, flat, and disposed 914 evenly upon the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to display story construction of timber, containing many apartments, together with a large dining-room and dancing-hall. In the rear of the hotel was a bayou, where pas strange splendors of scarlet and seal- 5 sengers landed-Village Bayou' it is brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down farther to off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more a whirling flower-drift of sleepy butterflies! ΤΟ Southwest, across the pass, gleams 15 beautiful Grande Isle: primitively a wilderness of palmetto (lantanier); — then drained, diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the 20 ocean reclaimed its own; - the canefields have degenerated into sandy plains, over which tramways wind to the smooth beach; the plantation-residences have been converted into rustic hotels, and the 25 negro-quarters remodeled into villages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander, its broad grazingmeadows yellow-starred with wild camomile, Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grande Terre is reiterated by most of the other 35 islands, Caillou, Cassetête, Calumet, Wine Island, the twin Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the many islets haunted by the gray pelican, all'of which are little more than sand-bars covered with wiry grasses, 40 prairie-cane, and scrub-timber. Last Island (L'Île Dernière),- well worthy a long visit in other years, in spite of its remoteness, is now a ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lying nearly 45 forty miles west of Grande Isle, it was nevertheless far more populated a generation ago: it was not only the most celebrated island of the group, but also the most fashionable watering-place of the 50 aristocratic South; - to-day it is visited by fishermen only, at long intervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled that of Grande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much similar, al- 55 though finer: a charming village of cottages facing the Gulf near the western end. The hotel itself was a massive two still called by seamen;- - but the deep channel which now cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did not exist while the village remained. The sea tore it out in one night-the same night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished into the Gulf, leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame houses and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found there after the cataclysm-a cow! But how that solitary cow survived the fury of a stormflood that actually rent the island in twain has ever remained a mystery. - On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees - when there are any trees - all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle 30 I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,- bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed; - for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry: far out you can see, through a good glass. the porpoises at play where of old the sugar-cane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dykes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams whole forests of drifthuge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy; and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven. And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,-- usually at some long point |