for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities.
The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the
absence of the river man. If he was there he had taken in his sign,
he was in disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces,
and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it,
which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd
in the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis.
In those times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men;
given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely
to be from the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now,
and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. Why, in my time they
used to call the ‘barkeep’ Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him on
the shoulder; I watched for that. But none of these people did it.
Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in
these twenty-one years.
When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying.
Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Bascom,
nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handy
in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you
meant him. He said–
‘What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?–
drink this slush?’
‘Can’t you drink it?’
‘I could if I had some other water to wash it with.’
Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected
this water’s mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries
would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent,
bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre
of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese.
If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate
the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find
them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.
The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome.
The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst. But the natives
do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them.
When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass,
they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel.
It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once
used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case.
It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless
for all other purposes, except baptizing.
Next morning, we drove around town in the rain.
The city seemed but little changed. It WAS greatly changed,
but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London
and Pittsburgh, you can’t persuade a new thing to look new;
the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take
your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size,
since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city
of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts,
it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there
is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be.
The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over
the town, and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very much
thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think.
I heard no complaint.
However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in
dwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautiful
and modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them;
whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks,
and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched
frame-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough
when it was rarer.