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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 38

Life On The Mississippi

Chapter 38


                         The House Beautiful

WE took passage in a Cincinnati boat for New Orleans; or on a Cincinnati boat--
either is correct; the former is the eastern form of putting it,
the latter the western.

Mr. Dickens declined to agree that the Mississippi steamboats
were 'magnificent,' or that they were 'floating palaces,'--
terms which had always been applied to them; terms which did not
over-express the admiration with which the people viewed them.

Mr. Dickens's position was unassailable, possibly; the people's
position was certainly unassailable. If Mr. Dickens was
comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the Taj,
or with the Matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful
thing which he had seen, they were not magnificent--he was right.
The people compared them with what they had seen; and, thus measured,
thus judged, the boats were magnificent--the term was the correct one,
it was not at all too strong. The people were as right as was
Mr. Dickens. The steamboats were finer than anything on shore.
Compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in
the Valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were 'palaces.'
To a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis, they were
not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority
of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over
both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces;
they tallied with the citizen's dream of what magnificence was,
and satisfied it.

Every town and village along that vast stretch of double
river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--
the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen.
It is easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling
fence painted white--in fair repair; brick walk from gate
to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house, painted white
and porticoed like a Grecian temple--with this difference,
that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals
were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted;
iron knocker; brass door knob--discolored, for lack
of polishing. Within, an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards;
opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen--
in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet;
mahogany center-table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade--
standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns,
by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp-mat;
several books, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness,
according to an inherited and unchangeable plan; among them,
Tupper, much penciled; also, 'Friendship's Offering,'
and 'Affection's Wreath,' with their sappy inanities illustrated
in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian; 'Alonzo and Melissa:'
maybe 'Ivanhoe:' also 'Album,' full of original 'poetry'
of the Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed;
two or three goody-goody works--'Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,'
etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous Godey's
'Lady's Book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure
women with mouths all alike--lips and eyelids the same size--
each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from
under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot.
Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with
pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded
good old fireplace. On each end of the wooden mantel,
over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits,
natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax,
and painted to resemble the originals--which they don't. Over
middle of mantel, engraving--Washington Crossing the Delaware;
on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and-lightning
crewels by one of the young ladies--work of art which would
have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could
have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it.
Piano--kettle in disguise--with music, bound and unbound,
piled on it, and on a stand near by: Battle of Prague;
Bird Waltz; Arkansas Traveler; Rosin the Bow; Marseilles Hymn;
On a Lone Barren Isle (St. Helena); The Last Link is Broken;
She wore a Wreath of Roses the Night when last we met;
Go, forget me, Why should Sorrow o'er that Brow a Shadow fling;
Hours there were to Memory Dearer; Long, Long Ago; Days of Absence;
A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling Deep; Bird at Sea;
and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive singer has left it,
RO-holl on, silver MOO-hoon, guide the TRAV-el-lerr his WAY, etc.
Tilted pensively against the piano, a guitar--guitar capable
of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you give it a start.
Frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on the premises,
sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses:
progenitor of the 'God Bless Our Home' of modern commerce.
Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts,
conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies;
being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly:
lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees
on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous
in the corner. Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena. Steel-plates, Trumbull's
Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar.
Copper-plates, Moses Smiting the Rock, and Return of the
Prodigal Son. In big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil:
papa holding a book ('Constitution of the United States');
guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck;
the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantelettes,
one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball
of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back.
These persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned.
Opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and
twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved,
glaring pallidly out from a background of solid Egyptian night.
Under a glass French clock dome, large bouquet of stiff
flowers done in corpsy-white wax. Pyramidal what-not
in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac
of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect:
shell, with the Lord's Prayer carved on it; another shell--
of the long-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long,
running from end to end--portrait of Washington carved on it;
not well done; the shell had Washington's mouth, originally--
artist should have built to that. These two are memorials of
the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French Market.
Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz,
with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet
of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint;
pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the Plains;
three 'alum' baskets of various colors--being skeleton-frame of wire,
clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style--
works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles
and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land;
convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card;
painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its
under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--
limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined;
pewter presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer,
to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat;
small Napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes
of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends,
in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back,
and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance--
that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures
lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured
from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze;
all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them
uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which
the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion;
husband and wife generally grouped together--husband sitting,
wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and both preserving,
all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's
brisk 'Now smile, if you please!' Bracketed over what-not--
place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done
by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died.
Pity, too; for she might have repented of this in time.
Horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from
under you. Window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids
and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors.
Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded.
Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort,
with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening;
snuffy feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane-seat chairs,
splint-bottomed rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size,
veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly--
but not certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers.
Nothing else in the room. Not a bathroom in the house;
and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen
one.

That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from
the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis. When he stepped
aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world:
chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--
and maybe painted red; pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards,
all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns;
gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell;
gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy
boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with Windsor armchairs;
inside, a far-receding snow-white 'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture
on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched
up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista;
big chandeliers every little way, each an April shower of
glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling everywhere
from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long-drawn,
resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying spectacle!
In the ladies' cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush,
and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers.
Then the Bridal Chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still
alive and unhanged, at that day--Bridal Chamber whose pretentious
flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect
of that hosannahing citizen. Every state-room had its couple
of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet;
and sometimes there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part
of a towel which could be told from mosquito netting by an expert--
though generally these things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved
passengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls
in the barber shop, where were also public towels, public combs,
and public soap.

Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her
in her highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable,
and satisfactory estate. Now cake her over with a layer
of ancient and obdurate dirt, and you have the Cincinnati
steamer awhile ago referred to. Not all over--only inside;
for she was ably officered in all departments except the steward's.

But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the
counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times:
for the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change;
neither has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any.

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