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 8 A.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 BOTH
hands 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;