manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible.
A home without a cat–and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat–
may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge
of the brick sidewalks, stood locust trees with trunks protected by
wooden boxing, and these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrancer
in spring, when the clusters of buds came forth. The main street,
one block back from the river, and running parallel with it, was the
sole business street. It was six blocks long, and in each block two
or three brick stores, three stories high, towered above interjected
bunches of little frame shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind the
street’s whole length. The candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility
proud and ancient along the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated
merely the humble barbershop along the main street of Dawson’s Landing.
On a chief corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to
bottom with tin pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger’s noisy
notice to the world (when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand
for business at that corner.
The hamlet’s front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;
its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline;
its most rearward border fringed itself out and scattered its houses
about its base line of the hills; the hills rose high, enclosing the
town in a half-moon curve, clothed with forests from foot to summit.
Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to
the little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped;
the big Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers
or freight; and this was the case also with the great flotilla of
“transients.” These latter came out of a dozen rivers–
the Illinois, the Missouri, the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio,
the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red River, the White River,
and so on–and were bound every whither and stocked with every imaginable
comfort or necessity, which the Mississippi’s communities could want,
from the frosty Falls of St. Anthony down through nine climates
to torrid New Orleans.
Dawson’s Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked
grain and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and comfortable
and contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly–
very slowly, in fact, but still it was growing.
The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court. He was very proud of his old Virginian ancestry,
and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately manners,
he kept up its traditions. He was fine and just and generous.
To be a gentleman–a gentleman without stain or blemish–was his
only religion, and to it he was always faithful. He was respected,
esteemed, and beloved by all of the community. He was well off,
and was gradually adding to his store. He and his wife were very
nearly happy, but not quite, for they had no children. The longing for
the treasure of a child had grown stronger and stronger as the years
slipped away, but the blessing never came–and was never to come.
With this pair lived the judge’s widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt,
and she also was childless–childless, and sorrowful for that reason,
and not to be comforted. The women were good and commonplace people,
and did their duty, and had their reward in clear consciences and the
community’s approbation. They were Presbyterians, the judge was a freethinker.
Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged almost forty, was another
old Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families.
He was a fine, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest
requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority
on the “code”, and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you in
the field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious to you,
and explain it with any weapon you might prefer from bradawls to artillery.
He was very popular with the people, and was the judge’s dearest friend.