an epidemic, they rush ’em to the cemetery the minute the breath’s out.
No market for ice in an epidemic. Same with Embamming.
You take a family that’s able to embam, and you’ve got a soft thing.
You can mention sixteen different ways to do it–though there
AIN’T only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts
of it–and they’ll take the highest-priced way, every time.
It’s human nature–human nature in grief. It don’t reason, you see.
Time being, it don’t care a dam. All it wants is physical immortality
for deceased, and they’re willing to pay for it. All you’ve got
to do is to just be ca’m and stack it up–they’ll stand the racket.
Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn’t GIVE away; and get
your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours
he is worth a cool six hundred–that’s what HE’S worth. There ain’t
anything equal to it but trading rats for di’monds in time of famine.
Well, don’t you see, when there’s an epidemic, people don’t wait to embam.
No, indeed they don’t; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say–
hurts it like hell-th, HEALTH, see?–Our little joke in the trade.
Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any–I mean,
when you’re going by, sometime.’
In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself,
if any has been done. I have not enlarged on him.
With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject.
As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once,
who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner–
‘I wouldn’t worry about that, if I had your chances.’
Much he knew about it–the family all so opposed to it.
Chapter 44
City Sights
THE old French part of New Orleans–anciently the Spanish part–
bears no resemblance to the American end of the city:
the American end which lies beyond the intervening
brick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks;
are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern,
with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect;
all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long,
iron-railed verandas running along the several stories.
Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain
with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster.
It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural
a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds.
This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated;
neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.
The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is often
exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful–with a large
cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling,
intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made,
and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable.
They are become BRIC-A-BRAC.
The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient
quarter of New Orleans with the South’s finest literary genius,
the author of ‘the Grandissimes.’ In him the South has found
a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.
In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and
vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it,
more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal
contact with it.
With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate,
a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vivid
sense as of unseen or dimly seen things–vivid, and yet fitful and darkling;
you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them
imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were,
of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons
of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.
We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices.
There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it
as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever