be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils,
and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals.
Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labeled it,
and brought it back as olive oil. This trade grew to be so formidable
that Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it
from working serious injury to her oil industry.
Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi.
Her perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees
on that side of the river. In its normal condition it is a pretty town;
but the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it;
whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water,
and the outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain
extending upwards from the foundations. Stranded and discarded scows lay
all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing;
the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,–
a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think
a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep,
and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing.
A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating
infliction to a fire.
We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday:
two full hours’ liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight.
In the back streets but few white people were visible,
but there were plenty of colored folk–mainly women and girls;
and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes
of swell and elaborate style and cut–a glaring and hilarious
contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.
Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population–
which is placed at five thousand. The country about it is
exceptionally productive. Helena has a good cotton trade;
handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has
a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills,
machine shops and wagon factories–in brief has $1,000,000
invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways,
and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region.
Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by
the New Orleans ‘Times-Democrat’ at $4,000,000.
Chapter 31
A Thumb-print and What Came of It
WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think
about my errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny.
This was bad–not best, anyway; for mine was not
(preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more I thought,
the more that fact pushed itself upon me–now in one form,
now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:
is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a
little sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night
for it, and no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it.
Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out
of most perplexities.
I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really
seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon.
Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous.
Their main argument was one which has always been the first to come
to the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time:
‘But you decided and AGREED to stick to this boat, etc.; as if,
having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead
and make TWO unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success:
under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I
had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it,
I presently drifted into its history–substantially as follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.
In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner’s PENSION,
1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there,
in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers.