SOCIAL LIFE IN
OLD NEW ORLEANS

The Author at Twenty-two

Painted by Moïse

SOCIAL LIFE IN
OLD NEW ORLEANS

Being Recollections of my Girlhood

BY
ELIZA RIPLEY

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXII

Copyright, 1912, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

To
MY CHILDREN
and
MY CHILDREN’S CHILDREN
and to
THEIR CHILDREN TO COME

FOREWORD

Far more vivid than the twilight of the days in which I dwell, there rises before my inner eye the vision, aglow in Southern sunshine, of the days that are gone, never to return, but which formed the early chapters of a life that has been lived, that can never be lived again.

Many of the following stories are oft-told tales at my fireside—others were written to record phases of the patriarchal existence before the war which has so utterly passed away.

They have been printed from time to time in the pages of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, the editor of which has very kindly consented to their publication in this form.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SOCIAL LIFE IN OLD NEW ORLEANS

I
NEW ORLEANS CHILDREN OF 1840

“Children should be seen and not heard.” Children were neither seen nor heard in the days of which I write, the days of 1840. They led the simple life, going and coming in their own unobtrusive way, making no stir in fashionable circles, with laces and flounces and feathered hats. There were no ready-made garments then for grown-ups, much less for children. It was before California gold mines, before the Mexican war, before money was so abundant that we children could turn up our little noses at a picayune. I recall the time when Alfred Munroe descended from Boston upon the mercantile world of New Orleans, and opened on Camp Street a “one price” clothing store for men. Nobody had ever heard of one price, and no deviation, for anything, from a chicken to a plantation. The fun of hectoring over price, and feeling, no matter how the trade ended, you had a bargain after all, was denied the customers of Mr. Alfred Munroe. The innovation was startling, but Munroe retired with a fortune in course of time.

Children’s clothes were home-made. A little wool shawl for the shoulders did duty for common use. A pelisse made out of an old one of mother’s, or some remnant found in the house, was fine for Sunday wear. Pantalettes of linen, straight and narrow and untrimmed, fell over our modest little legs to our very shoetops. Our dresses were equally simple and equally “cut down and made over.” Pantalettes were white, but I recall, with a dismal smile, that when I was put into what might be called unmitigated mourning for a brother, my pantalettes matched my dresses, black bombazine or black alpaca.

Our amusements were of the simplest. My father’s house on Canal Street had a flat roof, well protected by parapets, so it furnished a grand playground for the children of the neighborhood. Judge Story lived next door and Sid and Ben Story enjoyed to the full the advantages of that roof, where all could romp and jump rope to their heart’s content. The neutral ground, that is now a center for innumerable lines of street cars, was at that time an open, ungarnished, untrimmed, untended strip of waste land. An Italian banana and orange man cleared a space among the bushes and rank weeds and erected a rude fruit stall where later Clay’s statue stood. A quadroon woman had a coffee stand, in the early mornings, at the next corner, opposite my father’s house. It could not have been much beyond Claiborne Street that we children went crawfishing in the ditches that bounded each side of that neutral ground, for we walked, and it was not considered far.

The Farmers’ and Traders’ Bank was on Canal Street, and the family of Mr. Bell, the cashier, lived over the bank. There were children there and a governess, who went fishing with us. We rarely caught anything and had no use for it when we did.

Sometimes I was permitted to go to market with John, way down to the old French Market. We had to start early, before the shops on Chartres Street were open, and the boys busy with scoops watered the roadway from brimming gutters. John and I hurried past. Once at market we rushed from stall to stall, filling our basket, John forgetting nothing that had been ordered, and always carefully remembering one most important item, the saving of at least a picayune out of the market money for a cup of coffee at Manette’s stall. I drank half the coffee and took one of the little cakes. John finished the repast and “dreened” the cup, and with the remark, “We won’t say anything about this,” we started toward home. We had to stop, though, at a bird store, on the square above the Cathedral, look at the birds, chaff the noisy parrots, watch the antics of the monkeys, and see the man hang up his strings of corals and fix his shells in the window, ready for the day’s business. We could scarcely tear ourselves away, it was so interesting; but a reminder that the wax head at Dr. De Leon’s dentist’s door would be “put out by this time,” hurried me to see that wonderful bit of mechanism open and shut its mouth, first with a row of teeth, then revealing an empty cavern. How I watched, wondered and admired that awfully artificial wax face! These occasional market trips—and walks with older members of the family—were the sum of my or any other child’s recreation.

Once, and only once, there was a party! The little Maybins had a party and every child I knew was invited. The Maybins lived somewhere back of Poydras Market. I recall we had to walk down Poydras Street, beyond the market, and turn to the right onto a street that perhaps had a name, but I never heard it.

The home was detached, and surrounded by ample grounds; quantities of fig trees, thickets of running roses and in damp places clusters of palmetto and blooming flags. We little invited guests were promptly on the spot at 4 P. M., and as promptly off the spot at early candlelight. I am sure no débutantes ever had a better time than did we little girls in pantalettes and pigtails. We danced; Miss Sarah Strawbridge played for us, and we all knew how to dance. Didn’t we belong to Mme. Arraline Brooks’ dancing school?

The corner of Camp and Julia Streets, diagonally across from the then fashionable 13 Buildings, was occupied by Mme. Arraline Brooks, a teacher of dancing. Her school (studio or parlor it would be called now) was on the second floor of Armory Hall, and there we children—she had an immense class, too—learned all the fancy whirls and “heel and toe” steps of the intricate polka, which was danced in sets of eight, like old-time quadrilles. Mme. Arraline wore in the classroom short skirts and pantalettes, so we had a good sight of her feet as she pirouetted about, as agile as a ballet dancer.

By and by, at a signal from Miss Sarah, who had been having a confidential and persuasive interview with a little miss, we were all placed with our backs to the wall and a space cleared. Miss Sarah struck a few notes, and little Tenie Slocomb danced the “Highland fling.” Very beautiful was the little sylph in white muslin, her short sleeves tied with blue ribbons, and she so graceful and lovely. It comes to me to-day with a thrill, when I compare the companion picture—of a pale, delicate, dainty old lady, with silvered hair and tottering step, on the bank of a foreign river. It is not easy to bridge the seventy years (such a short span, too, it is) between the two. Then the march from “Norma” started us to the room for refreshments. It is full forty years since I have heard that old familiar air, but for thirty years after that date I did not hear it that the impulse to march to lemonade and sponge cake did not seize me.

Alack-a-day! Almost all of us have marched away.

II
NEW ORLEANS SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS IN THE FORTIES

Of course, seventy years ago, as in the ages past and to come, convents were the places for educating young girls in a Catholic community. Nevertheless, there have always been schools and schools, for those whom it was not expedient or convenient to board in a convent. In New Orleans the Ursuline Convent was too remote from the majority of homes for these day scholars, so there were a few schools among the many that come to my mind to-day, not that I ever entered one of them, but I had girl friends in all. In the thirties St. Angelo had a school on Customhouse Street, next door to the home of the Zacharies. His method of teaching may have been all right, but his discipline was objectionable; he had the delinquent pupils kneel on brickdust and tacks and there study aloud the neglected lesson. Now, brickdust isn’t so very bad, and tacks only a trifle worse, when one’s knees are protected by stockings or even pantalettes, but stockings in those days did not extend over the knee, and old St. Angelo was sure to see that the pantalettes were well rolled up. This method of discipline was not acceptable to parents whose children came home with bruises and wounds. That dominie retired from business before the forties.

Mme. Granet had a school for girls in the French municipality. Elinor Longer, one of my most intimate friends, attended it, and she used to tell us stories that convulsed us with laughter about Madame’s daughter. Lina had some eye trouble, and was forbidden to “exercise the tear glands,” but her tears flowed copiously when Madame refused to submit to her freaks. Thus Lina managed, in a way, to run the school, having half holidays and other indulgences so dear to the schoolgirl, at her own sweet will.

At the haunted house (I wonder if it is still standing and still haunted?) on Royal Street, Mme. Delarouelle had a school for demoiselles. Rosa, daughter of Judge John M. Duncan, was a scholar there. I don’t think the madame had any boarders, though the house was large and commodious, even if it was haunted by ghosts of maltreated negroes. The school could not under those circumstances have continued many years, for every child knew it was dangerous to cross its portals. Our John told me he “seed a skel’ton hand” clutching the grated front door once, and he never walked on that side of the street thereafter. He even knew a man “dat seen eyes widout sockets or sockets widout eyes, he dun know which, but dey could see, all de same, and they was a looken out’en one of the upstairs winders.” With such gruesome talk many a child was put to bed in my young days.

Doctor, afterward Bishop Hawks, when he was rector of Christ Church, then on Canal Street, had a school on Girod Street. It was a temporary affair and did not continue over a season or two. It was entirely conducted by Mrs. Hawks and her daughters, so far as I know, for, as before mentioned, I attended none of the schools.

In 1842 there was a class in Spanish at Mr. Hennen’s house, on Royal Street, near Canal. Señor Marino Cubi y Soler was the teacher of that class; a very prosaic and painstaking teacher he was, too, notwithstanding his startlingly high flown cognomen. Miss Anna Maria and young Alfred Hennen and a Dr. Rhodes, from the Belize, as the mouth of the Mississippi is called, with a few other grown-ups, formed the señor’s class. I was ten years old, but was allowed to join with some other members of my family, though my mother protested it was nonsense for a child like me and a waste of money. Father did not agree with her, and after over sixty years to think it over, I don’t either. When the señor’s class dispersed I imagine the text-books, of which, by the way, he was author, were laid aside. But years and years thereafter, during the war, while traveling in Mexico, some of the señor’s teaching came miraculously back to me, bringing with it enough Spanish to be of material help in that stranger country.

Another teacher wandered from house to house with his “Telemaque” and “colloquial phrases,” giving lessons in French. Gimarchi, from the name, may have been partly, at least, Italian, but he was a fine teacher of the sister language. Por supuésto, his itinerary was confined to the American district of the city.

Is it any surprise that the miscellaneous education we girls of seventy years ago in New Orleans had access to, culminated by fitting us for housewives and mothers, instead of writers and platform speakers, doctors and lawyers—suffragettes? Everybody was musical; every girl had music lessons and every mother superintended the study and practice of the one branch deemed absolutely indispensable to the education of a demoiselle. The city was dotted all over with music teachers, but Mme. Boyer was, par excellence, the most popular. She did not wander from house to house, but the demoiselles, music roll in hand, repaired to her domicile, and received instruction in a music room barely large enough to contain a piano, a scholar and a madame who was, to say the least, immense in bulk, the style of Creole who appears best in a black silk blouse volante.

Richard Henry Chinn

Painted by Hardin

Art was not taught, art was not studied, art was not appreciated. I mean by art the pencil and the brush, so busily wielded in every school now. No doubt there were stifled geniuses whose dormant talent was never suspected, so utterly ignored were the brush and the palette of the lover of art. I call to mind the ability evinced by Miss Celestine Eustis in the use of the pencil. She occasionally gave a friend a glimpse of some of her work, of which, I regret to say, she was almost ashamed, not of the work, but of the doing it. I recall a sketch taken of Judge Eustis’ balcony, and a group of young society men; the likenesses, unmistakably those of George Eustis and of Destour Foucher, were striking.

M. Devoti, with his violin in a green baize bag, was a professor of deportment and dancing. He undertook to train two gawky girls of the most awkward age in my father’s parlor. M. Devoti wore corsets! and laced, as the saying is, “within an inch of his life.” He wore a long-tail coat, very full at the spider waist-line, that hung all round him, almost to the knees, so he used it like a woman’s skirt, and could demonstrate to the awkward girls the art of holding out their skirts with thumb and forefinger, and all the other fingers sticking out stiff and straight. Then curtsey! throw out the right foot, draw up the left.

Another important branch of deportment was to seat the awkwards stiffly on the extreme edge of a chair, fold the hands on the very precarious lap, droop the eyes in a pensive way. Then Devoti would flourish up and present, with an astonishing salaam, a book from the center table. The young miss was instructed how to rise, bow and receive the book, in the most affected and mechanical style. Another exercise was to curtsey, accept old Devoti’s arm and majestically parade round and round the center table. The violin emerged from the baize bag, Devoti made it screech a few notes while the trio balanced up and down, changed partners and promenaded, till the awkwards were completely bewildered and tired out. He then replaced the violin, made a profound bow to extended skirts and curtseys, admonished the pupils to practice for next lesson, and vanished. Thus ended the first lesson. Dear me! Pock-marked, spider-waist Devoti is as plain to my eye to-day as he was in the flesh, bowing, smiling, dancing with flourishing steps as in the days of long ago.

Were those shy girls benefited by that artificial training? I opine not. This seems to modern eyes, mayhap, a whimsical exaggeration; nevertheless, it is a true picture. Devoti’s style was indeed the “end of an era”; he had no successor. Turveydrop, the immortal Turveydrop himself, was not even an imitator. These old schools and teachers march before my mind’s eye to-day; very vivid it all is to me, though the last of them, and perhaps all those they tried to teach, have passed away. Children who went to Mme. Granet and Mme. Delarouelle and Dr. Hawks and all the other schools of that day, sent their daughters, a decade or two later, to Mme. Desrayoux. Now she is gone and many of the daughters gone also. And it is left to one old lady to dig out the past, and recall, possibly to no one but herself, New Orleans schools, teachers and scholars of seventy years ago.

III
BOARDING SCHOOL IN THE FORTIES

I wonder if the parents of the present do not sometimes contrast the fashionable schools in which their daughters are being educated with the fashionable schools to which their aged mothers, mayhap grandmothers, were sent sixty and more years ago? Among my possessions that I keep—according to the dictum of my grandchildren—“for sentimental sake,” is a much-worn “Scholar’s Companion,” which they scorn to look at when I bring it forth, and explain it to be the best speller that ever was; and a bent, much overworked crochet needle of my schooldays, for we worked with our hands as well as with our brains. The boarding school to which I refer was not unique, but a typical New England seminary of the forties. It was both fashionable and popular, but the young ladies were not, as now, expected to appear at a 6 o’clock dinner in a low neck (oh, my!) gown.

Lately, passing through the now much expanded city to which I was sent, such a young girl, on a sailing ship from New Orleans to New York in the early spring of 1847, I spent a half hour walking on Crown Street looking for No. 111. It was not there, not a trace of the building of my day left; nor was one, so far as I know, of the girls, my old schoolmates, left; all three of the dear, painstaking teachers sleeping in the old cemetery, at rest at last were they. Every blessed one lives in my memory, bright and young, patient and middle-aged—all are here to beguile my twilight hours....

The school routine was simple and precise, especially the latter. We had duties outside the schoolroom, the performance of which was made pleasant and acceptable, as when the freshly laundered clothes were stacked in neat little piles on the long table of the yellow room on Thursdays, ready for each girl to carry to her own room. There were also neat little stacks on each girl’s desk, of personal articles requiring repairs, buttons to replace, holes to patch, stockings to darn, and in the schoolroom on Thursday afternoons—how some of us hated the work!—it was examined and passed upon before we were dismissed. The long winter evenings we were assembled in the library and one of the teachers read to us. I remember one winter we had “Guy Mannering” and “Quentin Durward,” Sir Walter Scott’s lovely stories. We girls were expected to bring some work to occupy our fingers while listening to the readings, with the comments and explanations that illuminated obscure portions we might not comprehend.

There was an old-fashioned “high boy” (haut bois) in the library, in the capacious drawers of which were unmade garments for the missionary box. Woe unto the young lady who had no knitting, crocheting or hemstitching of her own to do! She could sew on red flannel for the little Hottentots! After hymn singing Sunday afternoons there was reading from some suitably saintly book. We had “Keith’s Evidences of Prophecy” (I have not seen a copy of that much-read and laboriously explained volume for more than sixty years). The tension of our minds produced by “prophecy” was mitigated once in a while by two goody-goody books, “Lamton Parsonage” and “Amy Herbert,” both, no doubt, long out of print.

There also were stately walks to be taken twice a day for recreation; walks down on the “Strand,” or some back street that led away from college campus and flirtatious students. Our school happened to be too near the college green, by the way. We marched in couples, a teacher to lead who had eyes both before and behind, and a teacher similarly equipped to follow. With all these precautions we—some of us were pretty—were often convulsed beyond bounds when “we met by chance, the only way,” on the very backest street, a procession of college fellows on mischief bent, marching two and two, just like us. In bad weather we were shod with what were called “gums” and wrapped in coats long and shaggy and weighing a ton. Waterproofs were a later invention. Wet or dry, cold or warm, those exercises had to be taken to keep us in good physical condition. I must mention in this connection that no matter what ailed us, in stomach or back, head or foot, we were dosed with hot ginger tea. I do not remember ever seeing a doctor in the house, or knowing of one being summoned. The girls hated that ginger tea, so no doubt many an incipient headache was not reported.

With the four spinsters (we irreverently called No. 111 Old Maids’ Hall) who lived in the house, there were scraggly, baldheaded, spectacled teachers from outside—a monsieur who read Racine and Molière with us and taught us j’aime, tu aime, which he could safely do, the snuffy old man; a fatherly sort of Turveydrop dancing master, who cracked our feet with his fiddle bow; a drawing master, who, because he sometimes led his class on sketching trips up Hillhouse Avenue, was immensely popular, and every one of us wanted to take drawing lessons. We did some water colors, too; some of us had not one particle of artistic talent. I was one of that sort, but I achieved a Baltimore oriole, which, years after, my admiring husband, who also had no artistic taste, had framed and “hung on the line” in our hall. Perhaps some Yankee may own it now, for during the war they took everything else we had, and surely a brilliant Baltimore oriole did not escape their rapacity!

Solid English branches were taught by the dear spinsters. We did not skin cats and dissect them. There was no class in anatomy, but there was a botany class, and we dissected wild flowers, which is a trifle more ladylike. Our drilling in chirography was something to marvel at in these days when the young people affect such complicated and involved handwriting that is not easily decipherable. And grammar! I now slip up in both grammar and rhetoric, but I have arrived at the failing age. We spent the greater part of a session parsing Pope’s “Essay on Man,” and at the closing of that book I think we knew the whole thing by heart. Discipline was, so to say, honorary. There were rules as to study and practice hours, and various other things. Saturday morning, after the “Collect of the day” and prayers, when we were presumed to be in a celestial frame of mind, each girl reported her infringement of rules—if she was delinquent, and she generally was. That system served to make us more truthful and conscientious than some of us might have been under a different training.

It was expressly stipulated that no money be furnished the pupils. A teacher accompanied us to do necessary shopping and used her discretion in the selection. If one of us expressed the need of new shoes her entire stock was inspected, and if a pair could be repaired it was done and the purchase postponed. Now, bear in mind, this was not a cheap, second rate school, but one of the best known and most fashionable. There were several young ladies from the South among the twenty or so boarders. The Northern girls were from the prominent New York families—Shermans, Kirbys, Phalens, Pumpellys and Thorns. This was before the fashionables of to-day came to the fore.

Speaking of reporting our delinquencies, we knew quite well that it was against the custom, at least, to bring reading matter into the school. There was a grand, large library of standard works of merit at our free disposal. In some way “Jane Eyre” (just published) was smuggled in and we were secretly reading it by turns. How the spinsters found it out we never knew, but they always found out everything, so we were scarcely surprised one Saturday morning to receive a lecture on the pernicious character of the book “Jane Eyre,” so unlike (and alas! so much more interesting than) Amy Herbert, with her missionary basket, her coals and her flannel petticoats. We were questioned, not by wholesale, but individually, if we had the book? If we had read the book? The first two or three in the row could reply in the negative, but as interrogations ran down the line toward the guilty ones they were all greatly relieved when one brave girl replied, “Yes, ma’am, I am almost through, please let me finish it.” Then “Jane” vanished from our possession.

When the Church Sewing Society met at our house, certain girls who were sufficiently advanced in music to afford entertainment to the guests were summoned to the parlor to play and sing, and incidentally have a lemonade and a jumble. I was the star performer (had I not been a pupil of Cripps, Dr. Clapp’s organist, since I was able to reach the pedal with my foot?). My overture of “La Dame Blanche” was quite a masterpiece, but my “Battle of Prague” was simply stunning. The “advance,” the “rattle of musketry,” the “beating of drums” (did you ever see the music score?) I could render with such force that the dear, busy ladies almost jumped from their seats. There were two Kentucky girls with fine voices also invited to entertain the guests. Alas! our fun came to an end. On one occasion when I ended the “Battle of Prague” with a terrific bang, there was an awful moment of silence, when one of the ladies sneezed with such unexpected force that her false teeth careered clear across the room! Not one of the guests saw it, or was aware that she quietly walked over and replaced them, but we naughty girls were so brimful of fun that we exploded with laughter. Nothing was said to us of the unfortunate contretemps, but the musical programmes were discontinued.

College boys helped to make things lively for us, though we did not have bowing acquaintance with one of them. Valentines poured in to us; under doors and over fences they rained. The dear spinsters laughed over them with us. Thanksgiving morning, when the front door was opened for the first time, and we were assembled in the hall ready to march to 11 o’clock church service, a gaunt, skinny, starved-to-death turkey was found suspended to the door knob, conspicuously tied by a broad red ribbon, with a Thanksgiving greeting painted on, so “one who ran could read.” No doubt a good many had read and run, for there had been hours allowed them. The dear spinsters were so mortified and shocked that we girls had not the courage to laugh.

By reason of my distance from home, reached by a long voyage on a sailing ship—the first steamer service between New York and New Orleans was in the autumn of 1848, and the Crescent City was the pioneer steamer—I spent the vacations under the benign influence of the teachers, always the only girl left, but busy and happy, enjoying all the privileges of a parlor boarder. I still have a book full of written directions for knitting and crocheting, and making all sorts of old-timey needle books and pincushions, the initial directions dated 1846, largely the collection and record of more than one long summer vacation at that New England school. What girl of to-day would submit to such training and routine? What boarding school, seminary or college is to-day conducted on such lines? Not one that you or I know. The changes in everything, in every walk of life, from the simple in my day and generation to the complicated of the present, sets me to moralizing. Like all old people who are not able to take an active interest in the present, I live in the past, where the disappointments and heartaches, for surely we must have had our share, are forgotten. We old people live in the atmosphere of a day dead—and gone—and glorified!

IV
PICAYUNE DAYS

The first time I ever saw a penny was at school in Yankeeland in 1847. It was given me to pay the man for bringing me a letter from the postoffice—10 cents postage, 1 cent delivery, in those days. People had to get their mail at the office. There was no free delivery. Certain neighborhoods of spinsters, however—the college town was full of such—secured the services of a lame, halt or blind man to bring their letters from the office to their door once a day for the stipend of a penny each.

There was no coin in circulation of less value than a picayune where was my home. A picayune, which represented so little value that a miser was called picayunish, at the same time represented such a big value that we children felt rich when we had one tied in the corner of our handkerchief. At the corner of Chartres and Canal Streets was a tiny soda fountain, where one could get a glass of soda for a picayune—or mead. We children liked mead. I never see it now, but, as I recall, it was a thick, honey, creamy drink. We must have preferred it because it seemed so much more for a picayune than the frothy, effervescent, palish soda water. It was a great lark to go with Pa and take my glass of mead, while he ordered ginger syrup (of all things!) with his soda. The changing years bring gold mines, greenbacks, tariffs, labor exactions and nouveaux riches, and a penny now buys about what a picayune did in my day. One pays a penny for ever so big a newspaper to-day. A picayune was the price of a small sheet in my time.

Market Doorway.

Many of us must remember the colored marchandes who walked the street with trays, deftly balanced on their heads, arms akimbo, calling out their dainties, which were in picayune piles on the trays—six small celesto figs, or five large blue ones, nestling on fig leaves; lovely popcorn tic tac balls made with that luscious “open kettle” sugar, that dear, fragrant brown sugar no one sees now. Pralines with the same sugar; why, we used it in our coffee. A few years ago, visiting dear Mrs. Ida Richardson, I reveled in our breakfast coffee. “I hope you preserve your taste for brown sugar coffee?” she said. I fairly jumped at the treat.

But a marchande is passing up the street, and if I am a little girl, I beg a picayune for a praline; if I am an old lady, I invest a picayune in a leaf with six figues célestes. Mme. Chose—I don’t give any more definite name, for it is a sub rosa venture on her part—had a soirée last night. Madame buys her chapeaux of Olympe, and her toilettes from Pluche or Ferret, and if her home is way down, even below Esplanade Street, where many Creoles live, she is thrifty and frugal. So this morning a chocolate-colored marchande, who usually vends picayune bouquets of violets from madame’s parterre, has her tray filled with picayune stacks of broken nougat pyramid and candied orange and macaroons very daintily arranged on bits of tissue paper. I vividly recall encountering way down Royal Street, where no one was loitering to see me, this chocolate marchande, and recognizing the delicacies of a ball the previous night. I was on my way to call on Mrs. Garnet Duncan, the dear, delightful woman who was such a gourmande, and I knew how delicious were those sweets; no one could excel a Creole madame in this confection. So I invested a few picayunes in some of the most attractive, carrying off to my sweet friend what I conveniently could. How she did enjoy them! And how she complained I had not brought more! The mesdames of that date are gone; gone also, no doubt, are the marchandes they sent forth. It was a very picayunish sort of business, but labor did not count, for one was not paying $20 a month for the reluctant services of a chocolate lady.

Then again, in the early morning, when one, en papilottes, came down to breakfast, listless and “out of sorts,” the chant of the cream cheese woman would be heard. A rush to the door with a saucer for a cheese, a tiny, heart-shaped cheese, a dash of cream poured from a claret bottle over it—all this for a picayune! How nice and refreshing it was. What a glorious addition to the breakfast that promised to pall on one’s appetite.

Picayune was the standard coin at the market. I wonder what is now? Soup bone was un escalin (two picayunes), but one paid for the soup vegetables, a bit of cabbage, a leek, a sprig of parsley, a tiny carrot, a still tinier turnip, all tied in a slender package. A cornet of fresh gumbo filé, a bunch of horse-radish roots, a little sage, parsley, herbs of every sort in packages and piles, a string of dried grasshoppers for the mocking bird, “un picayun,” the Indian or black woman squatting on the banquette at the old French Market would tell you.

A picayune was the smallest coin the richly appareled madame or the poor market negro could put in the collection box as she paused on her way at the Cathedral to tell her beads. There was no occasion for the priest to rebuke his flock for niggardliness. They may have been picayunish, but not to the extent of the congregation of one of the largest Catholic churches I wot of to-day, where the fathers were so tired counting pennies that it was announced from the pulpit: “No more pennies must be put in the box. We spend hours every week counting and stacking pennies, and it is a shocking waste of time. If you are so destitute that you can’t afford at least a nickel to your church, come to the vestry, after mass, and we will look into your needs and give you the relief the church always extends to her poor.”

The shabby old negro, with her heavy market basket, returning home, no doubt needing the prayers of her patron saint or some other churchly office, filched the picayune from the carefully counted market money. I know, no matter how carefully my mother doled the market fund to John, he always contrived to secure a picayune out of it, and for no saint, either, but for old Coffee-stand Palmyre.

Do not we old ladies remember the picayune dolls of our childhood? The wooden jointed dolls, the funny little things we had to play with, every feature, even hair and yellow earrings, painted on little, smooth bullet heads. They could be made to sit down and to crook their arms, but no ingenuity could make them stand a-loney. How we loved those little wooden dolls! We do not see a pauper child, not even a poor little blackie, with a picayune doll nowadays. I really believe we—I am talking of old ladies now—were happier, and had more fun with our picayune family than the little girls of the present day have with their $10 dolls, with glass eyes that are sure to fall out and long curls that are sure to tangle. We had no fears about the eyes and hair of our picayunes.

The picayune, whose memory I invoke, was a Spanish coin, generally worn pretty thin and often having a small hole in it. I remember my ambition was to accumulate enough picayunes to string on a thread for an ornament. It is unnecessary to say that in those thrifty days my ambition was not gratified. It is more than fifty years since I have seen one of those old 6¼ cent picayunes. I have a stiff, wooden corset board that I sometimes take out to show to my granddaughter when I find her “stooping,” that she may see the instrument that made grandma so straight. I would like to have a picayune to add to my very limited collection of relics. They flourished at the same era and have together vanished from our homes and shops.

We all must have known some “picayune people.” There was a family living near us who owned and occupied a large, fine home on St. Joseph Street, while we and the Grimshaws and Beins lived in rented houses near by. They had, besides, a summer home “over the lake” (and none of us had!). Often, on Mondays, a fish, or a quart of shrimp, or something else in the “over the lake” line, was sent to one of us, for sale. We used to laugh over the littleness of the thing. A quart of shrimp for a picayune was cheap and tempting, but none of us cared to buy of our rich neighbor. The climax came when an umbrella went the rounds for inspection. It was for raffle! Now, umbrellas, like pocket handkerchiefs, are always useful and never go out of fashion. With one accord, we declined chances in the umbrella.

I feel I am, for the fun of the thing, dragging forth a few skeletons from closets, but I do not ticket them, so no harm is done. In fact, if I ever knew, I have long since forgotten the name to tack onto the umbrella skeleton. And the fashionable madame who sent out on the streets what a lady we knew called the “perquisites” of her soirée supper has left too many well-known descendants. I would scorn to ticket the skeleton of that frugal and thrifty madame. There are no more umbrellas for a picayunish skeleton to raffle, no more such delicious sweets for the madame to stack into picayune piles, and, alack-a-day! no more picayunes, either.

V
DOMESTIC SCIENCE SEVENTY YEARS AGO

Housekeeping is vastly simplified since the days when my mother washed her teacups and spoons every morning. I love the old way; however, I do not practise it. If my grandchildren were to see the little wooden piggin brought me on a tray after breakfast, and see me wash the silver and glass they would think grandma has surely lost her mind. That purely domestic housewifely habit lasted long after my mother had passed away. It still is the vogue in many a New England household, but no doubt is among the lost virtues South. When I was a young lady and occasionally (oh, happy times!) spent a few days with the Slocombs, I always saw Mrs. Slocomb and her aged mother, dear old Mrs. Cox, who tremblingly loved to help, pass the tea things through their own delicate hands every morning. So it was at Mrs. Leonard Matthews’, and so it was in scores of wealthy homes.

Though we had ever so many servants, our family being a large one, my semi-invalid mother, who rarely left her home and never made visits, did a thousand little household duties that are now, even in families where only one or two servants are kept, entirely ignored by the ladies of the house. After a dinner party or an evening entertainment, and my father was hospitably inclined—much beyond his means—my mother passed all the silver, glass and china through her own delicate fingers, and we did not, as I recall after all this lapse of years, have anything of superlative value. It was not a matter of thrift or economy on her part, but a matter of course; everybody did the same.

After a visit to a New England family several years ago I was telling a Creole friend of the lovely old India china that had been in daily use over three generations. The reply was: “Oh, but they did not have a Christophe.” No doubt they had had several Christophes, but they never had a chance to wash those valuable cups. In the days of long ago housewives did not have negligées with floating ribbons and smart laces. They had calico gowns that a splash of water could not ruin.

A New Orleans Yard and Cistern.

Household furniture—I go back full seventy years—was simple and easily cared for. Carpets were generally what was known as “three-ply.” I don’t see them now, but in places, on humble floors, I see imitation Brussels or some other counterfeit. The first carpet I ever saw woven in one piece, like all the rugs so plentiful now (and that was at a much later date) was on the parlor floor of the Goodman house, on Toulouse Street, the home so full of bright young girls I so loved to visit. There was no concern to take away carpets to be cleaned and stored in the summer. Carpets were taken to some vacant lot and well beaten. The neutral green on Canal Street, green and weedy it was, too, was a grand place to shake carpets; no offense given if one carried them beyond Claiborne Street where were no pretentious houses. Then those carpets were thickly strewn with tobacco leaves, rolled up and stored in the garret, if you had one. Every house did not boast of that convenience.

Curtains were not satin damask. At the Mint when Joe Kennedy was superintendent, and his family were fashionable people, their parlor curtains were some red cotton stuff, probably what is known as turkey red; there was a white and red-figured border; they were looped over gilt rods meant to look like spears and muskets, in deference, I suppose, to the military side of that government building, for there were sentinels and guards stationed around about that gave the whole concern a most imposing and military air.

I remember at the Breedloves’ home there were net curtains (probably mosquito net), with a red border. They were thought rather novel and stylish. There were no madras, no Irish point, no Nottingham curtains even, so one did not have a large variety to choose from.

People had candelabras, and some elaborate affairs—they called them girandoles—to hold candles; they had heavy crystal drops that tinkled and scintillated and were prismatic and on the whole were rather fine. The candles in those gorgeous stands and an oil lamp on the inevitable center-table were supposed to furnish abundance of light for any occasion. When my sister dressed for a function she had two candles to dress by (so did I ten years later!), and two dusky maids to follow her all about, and hold them at proper points so the process of the toilet could be satisfactorily accomplished. Two candles without shades—nobody had heard of shades—were sufficient for an ordinary tea table. I was a grown girl, fresh from school, when I saw the first gaslight in a private house, at Mrs. Slocomb’s, on St. Charles Street. People sewed, embroidered, read and wrote and played chess evenings by candlelight, and except a few near-sighted people and the aged no one used glasses. There was not an oculist (a specialist, I mean) in the whole city.

Every woman had to sew. There were well-trained seamstresses in every house; no “ready-mades,” no machines. Imagine the fine hand-sewing on shirt bosoms, collars and cuffs. I can hear my mother’s voice now, “Be careful in the stitching of that bosom; take up two and skip four,” which I early learned meant the threads of the linen. What a time there was when the boys grew to tailor-cut pantaloons! Cut by a tailor, sewed at home, what a to-do there was when Charley had his first tail-coat; he could not sit on the tails, they were too short, so he made an uproar.

I recall also how I cried when sister’s old red and black “shot silk” dress was made over for me, and I thought I was going to be so fine (I was nine years old then and was beginning to “take notice”). The goods fell short, and I had to have a black, low neck, short-sleeve waist. In vain I was told it was velvet and ever so stylish and becoming. I knew better. However, that abbreviated dress and those abbreviated tails did duty at the dancing school.

But we have wandered from house furnishings to children’s clothes. We will go upstairs now and take a look at the ponderous four-poster bed, with its awful tester top, that covered it like a flat roof. That tester was ornamented with a wall paper stuff, a wreath of impossible red and yellow roses, big as saucers, stamped on it, and four strands of same roses reaching to the four corners of the monstrosity. The idea of lying, with a raging fever or a splitting headache, under such a canopy! However, there were “swells” (there always are “swells”) who had testers covered with silk.

I hear a rumor that furniture covered with horse-hair cloth is about to come to the fore again. Everybody in my early day had black haircloth furniture; maybe that was one reason red curtains were preferred, for furniture covered with black haircloth was fearfully funereal. However, as no moth devoured it, dust did not rest on its slick, shiny surface, and it lasted forever, it had its advantages. Every household possessed a haircloth sofa, with a couple of hard, round pillows of the same, the one too slippery to nap on and the others regular break-necks.

Door in the French Market.

Butler’s pantry! My stars! Who ever heard of a butler’s pantry, and sinks, and running water, and faucets inside houses? The only running water was a hydrant in the yard; the only sink was the gutter in the yard; the sewer was the gutter in the street, so why a butler’s pantry? To be sure there was a cistern for rainwater, and jars like those Ali Baba’s forty thieves hid themselves in. Those earthen jars were replenished from the hydrant, and the muddy river water “settled” by the aid of almond hulls or alum.

Of course, every house had a storeroom, called pantry, to hold supplies. It was lined with shelves, but the only light and air was afforded by a half-moon aperture cut into a heavy batten door. We had wire safes on the back porch and a zinc-lined box for the ice—nothing else—wrapped in a gray blanket, gray, I presume, on the same principle we children preferred pink cocoanut cakes—they kept clean longer than the white! Ice was in general use but very expensive. It was brought by ship from the North, in hogsheads.

For the kitchen there were open fireplaces with a pot hanging from a crane, skillets and spiders. We don’t even hear the names of those utensils now. By and by an enterprising housewife ventured on a cook stove. I have a letter written by one such, dated in New Orleans in 1840, in which she descants on the wonders achieved by her stove. “Why, Susan, we baked three large cakes in it at one time.” In the old way it required a spider for each cake.

There were no plated knives, but steel, and they had to be daily scoured with “plenty brickdust on your knife board,” but those knives cut like razors. There was no bric-a-brac, few pictures, nothing ornamental in the parlors. One house I remember well had a Bunker Hill monument, made, I guess, of stucco, and stuck all over with gay seashells; it was perhaps 25 or 30 inches high; it made a most commanding appearance on the center-table. When my sister made a tiresomely long call at that house it amused me to try to count the shells.

An old gentleman, called “Old Jimmie Dick” when I remember him, a rich cotton broker (the firm was Dick & Hill), made a voyage to Europe, and brought home some Apollos, and Cupids, and Mercuries, statues in the “altogether,” for his parlor. Jimmie Dick was a bachelor, and lived on Canal Street, near Carondelet or Baronne, and had a charming spinster niece keeping house for him, who was so shocked when she saw the figures mounted on pedestals (they were glaring white marble and only a trifle under life size) that she immediately made slips of brown holland and enveloped them, leaving only the heads exposed! I never went to that house but the one time when we surprised her in the act of robing her visitors!

I speak of houses that I visited with my grown sister. It was not comme il faut for a young lady to be seen too frequently on the street or to make calls alone. Mother was an invalid and made no visits. Father accompanied sister on ceremonious occasions. I was pressed into service when no one else was available. I feel I am going way back beyond the recollection of my readers, but some of the grandmothers, too old, mayhap, to do their own reading, can recall just such a life, a life that will never be lived again.

VI
A FASHIONABLE FUNCTION IN 1842

It is hard to realize while we are surrounded by so many housekeeping conveniences what an amount of time, energy, and, above all, knowledge of the craft were necessary to the giving of a reception seventy years ago, when every preparation had to be made in the house and under the watchful supervision of the chatelaine.

There were no chefs to be hired, nor caterers to be summoned, not even a postman to deliver invitations. All that was done “by hand.” A darky was sent forth with a basket of nicely “tied up with white ribbons” notes of invitation, and he went from house to house, sending the basket to the occupant, where she not only subtracted her special note, but had the privilege of seeing “who else was invited.” And if the darky was bewildered as to his next stopping-place she could enlighten him. This complicated mode of delivering invitations prevailed into the fifties.

The preparations for the supper involved so much labor that many hosts offered only eau sucrée or gumbo. There was no cut nor granulated nor pulverized sugar, to be turned from the grocer’s bag onto the scales. All sugar except the crude brown, direct from plantations, was in cone-shaped loaves as hard as a stone and weighing several pounds each. These well-wrapped loaves were kept hung (like hams in a smokehouse) from the closet ceiling. They had to be cut into chips by aid of carving knife and hammer, then pounded and rolled until reduced to powder, before that necessary ingredient was ready for use.

There were no fruit extracts, no essences for seasoning, no baking powder to make a half-beaten cake rise, no ground spices, no seedless raisins, no washed (?) currants, no isinglass or gelatine, and to wind up this imperfect list, no egg-beater! Still the thrifty housewife made and served cakes fit for the gods, with only Miss Leslie’s cook book to refer to, and that was published in the twenties. Ice cream was seasoned by boiling a whole vanilla bean in the milk; it was frozen in a huge cylinder without any inside fixtures to stir the mixture; it was whirled in the ice tub by hand—and a stout one at that—and required at least one hour, constant labor, to freeze the cream.

For jelly, calves’ feet were secured days in advance, and Madame superintended the making of gelatine. Pink jelly was colored with a drop or two of cochineal, yellow, doctored with lemon, and a beautiful pale green, colored with the strained juice of scalded spinach. These varieties were served in various attractive shapes; and all, even the green, were delicious. These preparations were also complicated by the necessity of procuring all supplies from the early morning market often a mile or more away, and which, besides, closed at 10 o’clock. No stepping to the corner grocery for eggs or butter in an unforeseen emergency, and to the credit of the community the “borrowing habit” was entirely unknown.

I remember a Mrs. Swiler, chiefly because when I went to see her, with an older sister, she “passed around” bananas. Cuban fruits were scarce in those days, and highly prized.

There were no awnings to be used in bad weather; no camp chairs for the invited guests if all came, and all wanted to sit down at the same time; no waterproofs for them to come in; no rubbers to protect feet from rain-soaked sidewalks; no street cars; no public conveyances that people ever hired for such occasions; no private carriages to bump you over rough cobblestones. So, there you are!

Courtyard on Carondelet Street

Arrived after all these tiresome preparations and your own discomfort at my father’s house, on Canal Street, to a reception given almost seventy years ago, in honor of Commodore Moore of the Texas navy, who brought to my father letters of introduction from President Mirabeau B. Lamar, of the Republic of Texas, and Gen. Sam Houston of the Texas army!

I have reason to think at this late date, not hearing to the contrary at the time, that the commodore’s visit was quite amicable and friendly. If he was escorted by Texas warships! or even arrived in his own flagship! I never knew. With his imposing uniform and a huge gilt star on his breast, a sword at his side, and a rather fierce mustache (mustaches were little worn then), he looked as if he were capable of doing mighty deeds of daring, for the enterprising new republic on our border. He was accompanied by his aide, a callow youth, also in resplendent attire, a sword so long and unwieldy he was continually tripping, and therefore too embarrassingly incommoded to circulate among the ladies. I met that “aide,” a real fighter in Texas during the late war. He proudly wore a lone star under the lapel of his coat of Confederate gray, and we had a merry laugh over his naval début. He was Lieut. Fairfax Grey. His sister was the wife of Temple Doswell, and many of her descendants are identified with New Orleans to-day.

Mr. Clay, grand, serene, homely and affable; also Gen. Gaines in his inevitable uniform. The two military and naval officers commanded my admiration, as I sat quietly and unobtrusively in a corner in a way “becoming to a child of nine”—“a chiel amang ye, takin’ notes”—but no one took note of the chiel. We had also a jolly itinerant Irish preacher, I think of the Methodist persuasion, whom my father had met at country camp meetings. His call was to travel, and incidentally preach where the harvest was ripe. I remember how, laughingly, he remarked to my father, anent the commodore’s visit, that the chief inhabitants of Western Texas were mesquite grass and buffaloes. He was father of John L. Moffitt of Confederate fame, and a very attractive daughter became the wife of President Lamar.

There was dance music—a piano only—but the room was too crowded for more than one attempt at a quadrille. The notabilities, army, navy and State, did not indulge in such frivolity. Life was too serious with them.

These functions generally began at 8 and terminated before the proverbial small hours. So by midnight the last petticoat had fluttered away; and then there followed the clearing up, and, as the old lady said, the “reinstating of affairs,” which kept the hostess and her sleepy helpers busy long after the rest of the family had fluttered away also—to the land of Nod.

VII
NEW YEAR’S OF OLD

“When I was young, time had for me the lazy ox’s pace,

But now it’s like the blooded horse that means to win the race.”

Here it is New Year’s Day again. It seems only yesterday when we had such a dull, stupid New Year’s Day. Everybody who was anybody was out of town, at country mansions to flourish with the rich, or to old homesteads to see their folks. Nobody walking the streets, no shops were open. Those of us who had no rich friends with country mansions, or no old homesteads to welcome us, remained gloomily at home, with shades down, servants off for the day, not even a basket for cards tied to the doorknob.

Nobody calls now at New Year’s. It is out of fashion, or, rather, the fashion has descended from parlor to kitchen. When Bridget and Mary don their finery and repair to Bridget’s cousin’s to “receive,” and Sambo puts on a high shirt collar and a stovepipe hat, and sallies out on his round of calls, we have a pick-up dinner, and grandma tries to enliven the family with reminiscences of the New Year’s Days of seventy years ago, when her mother and sister “received” in state, and father and brother donned their “stovepipes” and proceeded to fill the society rôle for the year.

In the forties and for years thereafter, New Year’s Day was the visiting day for the men, and receiving day for the ladies. All the fathers and grandfathers, in their newest rig, stick in hand, trotted or hobbled around, making the only calls they made from year to year. Before noon, ladies were in their parlors, prinked up, pomatumed up, powdered up, to “receive.” Calling began as early as 11, for it was a short winter day, and much to be accomplished. A small stand in the hall held a card receiver, into which a few cards left from last year’s stock were placed, so the first caller might not be embarrassed with the fact that he was the first. No one cared to be the very first then, any more than now.

A table of generous dimensions occupied a conspicuous position in the parlor (we never said “drawing room”), with silver tray, an immense and elaborately decorated cake and a grand bowl of foaming eggnog. That was chiefly designed for the beaux. On the dining room sideboard (we did not say “buffet,” either) a brandy straight or whisky straight was to be found for those walking-stick ones whose bones were stiff and whose digestion could not brook the fifty different concoctions of eggnog they were liable to find in the fifty different houses. Those varied refreshments, which every caller was expected to at least taste, often worked havoc on the young and spry, to say nothing of the halt and lame.

There were no flower decorations. It was the dead season for plants, and Boston greenhouses were not shipping carloads of roses and carnations to New Orleans in the ’40s. Rooms were not darkened, either, to be illuminated with gas or electricity, but windows were thrown wide open to the blessed light of a New Year’s Day. Little cornets of bonbons and dragées were carelessly scattered about. Those cornucopias, very slim and pointed, containing about a spoonful of French confections, were made of stiff, shiny paper, gaudily colored miniatures of impossible French damsels ornamenting them. I have not seen one of those pretty trifles for sixty years. It was quite the style for a swain to send his Dulcinea a cornet in the early morning. If the Dulcinea did not happen to receive as many as she wanted, she could buy a few more. One liked to be a Belle!

Living in Canal Street, a little girl was unconsciously taking notes that blossom now in a chronicle of the doings and sayings of those New Year’s Days of the early ’40s. She enjoyed looking through the open window, onto the broad, unshaded street, watching an endless procession of callers. There were rows of fashionable residences in Canal Street to be visited, and the darting in and out of open doors, as though on earnest business bent, was a sight. The men of that day wore skin-tight pantaloons (we did not call them trousers), often made of light-colored materials. I clearly remember a pea green pair that my brother wore, flickering like a chameleon in and out of open street doors. Those tight-fitting pantaloons were drawn taut over the shoe, a strong leather strap extending under the foot buckled the garment down good and tight, giving the wearer as mincing a gait as the girl in the present-day hobble skirt. The narrow clawhammer coat with tails that hung almost to the knees behind and were scarcely visible in front, had to have the corner of a white handkerchief flutter from the tail pocket.

Military men like Gen. E. P. Gaines (he was in his zenith at that date) and all such who could sport a military record wore stiff stocks about their long necks. Those stocks made the necks appear abnormally long. They were made of buckram (or sheet iron?), so broad that three straps were required to buckle them at the back, covered with black satin, tiny satin bows in front which were utterly superfluous, for they tied nothing and were not large enough to be ornamental. The stocks must have been very trying to the wearers, for they could not turn their heads when they were buckled up, and, like the little boy with the broad collar, could not spit over them. However, they did impart a military air of rigidity and stiffness, as though on dress parade all the time.

I remember Major Waters had a bald spot on the top of his head and two long strands of sandy hair on each side which he carefully gathered up over the bald spot and secured in place by the aid of a side comb! I used to wish the comb would fall out, to see what the major would do, for I was convinced he could not bend his head over that stiff, formidable stock. The major won his title at the battle of River Rasin (if you know where that is, I don’t). My father was in the same battle, but being only seventeen he did not win a title. I don’t suppose that River Rasin engagement amounted to much anyway, for dear pa did not wear a stock, nor a military bearing, either. Gen. Persifor Smith was another stock man who called always at New Year’s and at no other time. And Major Messiah! Dear me, how many of us remember him in the flesh, or can forget the cockaded, epauletted portrait he left behind when he fought his last life’s battle?

All the men wore tall silk hats that shone like patent leather. Those hats have not been banished so long ago that all of us have forgotten their monstrosity, still to be seen now and then in old daguerreotypes or cartes de visite. They flocked in pairs to do their visiting. It would be a Mardi Gras nowadays to see one of those old-time processions. Men of business, men of prominence, no longer society men, fulfilled their social duty once each year, stepped into the dining room at a nod from mother, who was as rarely in the parlor to “receive,” as the men who, at the sideboard, with a flourish of the hand and a cordial toast to the New Year, took a brandy straight. They are long gone. Their sons, the beaux of that day, quietly graduated from the eggnog to the sideboard, become even older men than their fathers, are gone, too.

I remember a very original, entertaining beau of those days saying eggnog was good enough for him, and when he felt he was arriving at the brandy-straight age he meant to kill himself. How would he know when the time for hari-kari came? “When my nose gets spongy.” He had a very pronounced Hebrew nose, by the way. Not so many years ago I heard of him hobbling on crutches. Not only his nose, but his legs were spongy, but he gave no indication that life was not as dear to him as in his salad days.

The younger element, beaux of my grown-up sister, rambled in all day long, hat in hand, with “A happy New Year,” a quaff of eggnog, “No cake, thanks,” and away like a flash, to go into house after house, do and say the same things, till night would find they had finished their list of calls and eggnog had about finished them. So the great day of the year wore on.

After the house doors were closed at the flirt of the last clawhammer coat tail, cards were counted and comments made as to who had called and who had failed to put in appearance, the wreck of glasses, cake and tray removed, and it was as tired a set of ladies to go to bed as of men to be put into bed.

As the beautiful custom of hospitality spread from the centers of fashion to the outskirts of society the demi mondaines, then the small tradesman, then the negroes became infected with the fashion of “receiving” at New Year’s, in their various shady abodes. The bon tons gradually relinquished the hospitable and friendly custom of years. Ladies suspended tiny card receivers on the doorknob, and retired behind closed blinds. Those of the old friends of tottering steps and walking sticks, always the last to relinquish a loved habit, wearily dropped cards into the little basket and passed on to the next closed door. Now the anniversary, instead of being one of pleasant greetings, is as stupid and dull as any day in the calendar, unless, as I have said, one has a friend with a “cottage by the sea” or a château on the hilltop and is also endowed with the spirit of hospitality to ask one to spend the week-end and take an eggnog or a brandy straight.

VIII
NEW ORLEANS SHOPS AND SHOPPING IN THE FORTIES

The shopping region of New Orleans was confined to Chartres and Royal Streets seventy years ago. It was late in the fifties when the first movement was made to more commodious and less crowded locations on Canal Street, and Olympe, the fashionable modiste, was the venturesome pioneer.

Woodlief’s was the leading store on Chartres Street and Barrière’s on Royal, where could be found all the French nouveautés of the day, beautiful barèges, Marcelines and chiné silks, organdies stamped in gorgeous designs, to be made up with wreathed and bouquet flounces, but, above and beyond all for utility and beauty, were the imported French calicoes, fine texture, fast colors. It was before the day of aniline and diamond dyes; blues were indigo, reds were cochineal pure and unadulterated; so those lovely goods, printed in rich designs—often the graceful palm-leaf pattern—could be “made over,” turned upside down and hindpart before, indefinitely, for they never wore out or lost color, and were cheap at fifty cents a yard. None but those in mourning wore black; even the men wore blue or bottle green coats, gay flowered vests and tan-colored pantaloons. I call to mind one ultra-fashionable beau who delighted in a pair of sage green “pants.”

The ladies’ toilets were still more gay; even the elderly ones wore bright colors. The first black silk dress worn on the street, and that was in ’49, was proudly displayed by Miss Mathilde Eustis, who had relatives in France who kept her en rapport with the latest Parisian style. Hers was a soft Marceline silk; even the name, much less the article, is as extinct as the barège and crêpe lisse of those far away days. It was at Woodlief’s or Barrière’s these goods were displayed on shelves and counters. There were no show windows, no dressed and draped wax figures to tempt the passerby.

Mme. Pluche’s shop, on the corner of Royal and Conti, had one window where a few trifles were occasionally displayed on the sill or hung, carefully draped on the side, so as not to intercept the light. Madame was all French and dealt only in French importations. Mme. Frey was on Chartres Street. Her specialty (all had specialties; there was no shop room for a miscellaneous stock of goods) was mantillas, visites, cardinals and other confections to envelop the graceful mesdames en flânant. I call to mind a visite of thinnest muslin, heavily embroidered (no Hamburg or machine embroidery in those days), lined with blue silk, blue cords and tassels for a finish. It was worn by a belle of the forties, and Mme. Frey claimed to have imported it. The madame was not French. She had a figure no French woman would have submitted to, a fog-horn voice and a well-defined mustache, but her taste was the best and her dictum in her specialty was final.

The fashionable milliner was Olympe. Her specialty was imported chapeaux. She did not—ostensibly, at least—make or even trim chapeaux. Olympe’s ways were persuasive beyond resistance. She met her customer at the door with “Ah, madame”—she had brought from Paris the very bonnet for you! No one had seen it; it was yours! And Mam’zelle Adèle was told to bring Mme. X’s chapeau. It fit to a merveille! It was an inspiration! And so Mme. X had her special bonnet sent home in a fancy box by the hand of a dainty grisette. Olympe was the first of her class to make a specialty of delivering the goods. And Monsieur X, though he may have called her “Old Imp,” paid the bill with all the extras of specialty and delivery included, though not itemized. Those were bonnets to shade the face—a light blue satin shirred lengthwise; crêpe lisse, same color, shirred crosswise over it, forming indistinct blocks; and a tout aller, of raspberry silk, shirred “every which way,” are two that I recall.

Madame a-shopping went followed by a servant to bring home the packages. Gloves, one button only, were light colored, pink, lavender, lemon, rarely white; and for ordinary wear bottle green gloves were considered very comme il faut. They harmonized with the green barège veil that every lady had for shopping.

Our shopping trip would be incomplete if we failed to call on an old Scotch couple who had a lace store under Col. Winthrop’s residence on Royal Street. The store had a door and a window, and the nice old parties who had such a prodigious Scotch brogue one would scarcely understand them, could, by a little skill, entertain three customers at one and the same time. If one extra shopper appeared, Mr. Syme disappeared, leaving the old lady to attend to business. She was almost blind from cataract, a canny old soul and not anyways blind to business advantages. I am pleased to add they retired after a few busy years quite well-to-do. There was Seibricht, on Royal Street, a furniture dealer, and still further down Royal Seignoret, in the same lucrative business, for I do not recall they had any competitors. Memory does not go beyond the time when Hyde and Goodrich were not the jewelers; and Loveille, on the corner of Customhouse and Royal, the grocer, for all foreign wines, cheeses, etc. Never do I see such Parmesan as we got from Loveille in my early days.

William McKean had a bookshop on Camp Street, a few doors above Canal. Billy McKean, as the irreverent called him, was a picture of Pickwick, and a clever, kindly old man was he. There was a round table in the rear of his shop, where one found a comfortable chair and a few books to browse over. In my childhood I was always a welcome visitor to that round table, for I always “sat quiet and just read,” as dear old Mr. McKean told me. As I turn the pages of my book of memories not only the names but the very faces of these shopkeepers of seventy years ago come to me, all smiles and winning ways, and way back I fly to my pantalette and pigtail days, so happy in these dreams that will never be reality to any place or people.

There were no restaurants, no lunch counters, no tea rooms, and (bless their dear hearts, who started it!) no woman’s exchange, no place in the whole city where a lady could drop in, after all this round of shopping, take a comfortable seat and order even a sandwich, or any kind of refreshment. One could take an éclair at Vincent’s, corner of Royal and Orleans, but éclairs have no satisfying quality.

There was a large hotel (there may be still—it is sixty years since I saw it), mostly consisting of spacious verandas, up and down and all around, at the lake end of the shellroad, where parties could have a fish dinner and enjoy the salt breezes, but a dinner at “Lake End” was an occasion, not a climax to a shopping trip. The old shellroad was a long drive, Bayou St. John on one side, swamps on the other, green with rushes and palmetto, clothed with gay flowers of the swamp flag. The road terminated at Lake Pontchartrain, and there the restful piazza and well-served dinner refreshed the inner woman.

I am speaking of the gentler sex. No doubt there were myriads of cabarets and eating places for men on pleasure or business bent. Three o’clock was the universal dinner hour, so the discreet mesdames were able to return to the city and be ready by early candlelight for the inevitable “hand round” tea.

Then there was Carrollton Garden (I think it is dead and buried now). There was a short railroad leading to Carrollton; one could see open fields and grazing cattle from the car windows as one crept along. Except a still shorter railroad to the Lake, connecting with the Lake boats, I think the rural road to Carrollton was the only one leading out of the city. The Carrollton hotel, like the Lake one, was all verandas. I never knew of any guest staying there, even one night, but there was a dear little garden and lots of summer houses and pagodas, covered with jasmines and honeysuckle vines. One could get lemonade or orgeat or orange flower syrup, and return to the city with a great bouquet of monthly roses, to show one had been on an excursion. A great monthly rose hedge, true to its name, always in bloom, surrounded the premises. To see a monthly rose now is to see old Carrollton gardens in the forties.

IX
THE OLD FRENCH OPERA HOUSE

It was on Orleans Street, near Royal—I don’t have to “shut my eyes and think very hard,” as the Marchioness said to Dick Swiveller, to see the old Opera House and all the dear people in it, and hear its entrancing music. We had “Norma” and “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Robert le Diable” and “La Dame Blanche,” “Huguenots,” “Le Prophète,” just those dear old melodious operas, the music so thrillingly catchy that half the young men hummed or whistled snatches of it on their way home.

There were no single seats for ladies, only four-seated boxes. The pit, to all appearances, was for elderly, bald gentlemen only, for the beaux, the fashionable eligibles, wandered around in the intermissions or “stood at attention” in the narrow lobbies behind the boxes during the performances. Except the two stage boxes, which were more ample, and also afforded sly glimpses towards the wings and flies, all were planned for four occupants. Also, all were subscribed for by the season. There was also a row of latticed boxes in the rear of the dress circle, usually occupied by persons in mourning, or the dear old messieurs et mesdames, who were not chaperoning a mademoiselle. One stage box belonged, by right of long-continued possession, to Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert Bullitt. The opposite box was la loge des lions, and no less than a dozen lions wandered in and out of it during an evening. Some were blasé and looked dreadfully bored, a few were young and frisky, but every mortal one of them possessed a pompous and self-important mien.

The Old French Opera House.

If weather permitted (we had to consider the weather, as everybody walked) and the opera a favorite, every seat would be occupied at 8 o’clock, and everybody quiet to enjoy the very first notes of the overture. All the fashionable young folks, even if they could not play or whistle “Yankee Doodle,” felt the opera was absolutely necessary to their social success and happiness. The box was only five dollars a night, and pater-familias certainly could afford that!

Think of five dollars for four seats at the most fashionable Opera House in the land then, and compare it with five dollars for one seat in the topmost gallery of the most fashionable house in the land to-day. Can one wonder we old people who sit by our fire and pay the bills wag our heads and talk of the degenerate times?

Toilets in our day were simple, too. French muslins trimmed with real lace, pink and blue barèges with ribbons. Who sees a barège now? No need of jeweled stomachers, ropes of priceless pearls or diamond tiaras to embellish those Creole ladies, many of whom were direct descendants of French nobles; not a few could claim a drop of even royal blood.

Who were the beaux? And where are they now? If any are living they are too old to hobble into the pit and sit beside the old, bald men.

It was quite the vogue to saunter into Vincent’s, at the corner, on the way home. Vincent’s was a great place and he treated his customers with so much “confidence.” One could browse about the glass cases of pâtés, brioches, éclairs, meringues, and all such toothsome delicacies, peck at this and peck at that, lay a dime on the counter and walk out. A large Broadway firm in New York attempted that way of conducting a lunch counter and had such a tremendous patronage that it promptly failed. Men went for breakfast and shopping parties for lunch, instead of dropping in en passant for an éclair.

As I said, we walked. There were no street cars, no ’buses and precious few people had carriages to ride in. So we gaily walked from Vincent’s to our respective homes, where a cup of hot coffee put us in condition for bed and slumber.

Monday morning Mme. Casimir or Mam’zelle Victorine comes to sew all day like wild for seventy-five cents, and tells how splendidly Rosa de Vries (the prima donna) sang “Robert, toi que j’aime” last night. She always goes, “Oui, madame, toujours,” to the opera Sunday. Later, dusky Henriette Blondeau comes, with her tignon stuck full of pins and the deep pockets of her apron bulging with sticks of bandoline, pots of pomade, hairpins and a bandeau comb, to dress the hair of mademoiselle. She also had to tell how fine was “Robert,” but she prefers De Vries in “Norma,” “moi.” The Casimirs lived in a kind of cubby-hole way down Ste. Anne Street. M. Casimir was assistant in a barber shop near the French Market, but such were the gallery gods Sunday nights, and no mean critics were they. Our nights were Tuesday and Saturday.

Society loves a bit of gossip, and we had a delightful dish of it about this time, furnished us by a denizen of Canal Street. He was “horribly English, you know.” As French was the fashion then, it was an impertinence to swagger with English airs. The John Bull in question, with his wife all decked out in her Sunday war paint and feathers, found a woman calmly seated in his pew at Christ Church, a plainly dressed, common appearing woman, who didn’t even have a flower in her bonnet. The pew door was opened wide and a gesture accompanied it, which the common-looking somebody did not fail to comprehend. She promptly rose and retired into the aisle; a seat was offered her nearer the door of the church, which she graciously accepted. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had asked for a seat in that pew, as she bore a letter of introduction to its occupant. This incident gave us great merriment, for the inhospitable Englishman had been boasting of the coming of Lady Mary. I introduce it here, for it has a moral which gives a Sunday school flavor to my opera reminiscences. Now they have all gone where they are happily singing, I hope, even better than Rosa de Vries, and where there are no doors to the pews.

X
MURAL DECORATIONS AND PORTRAITS OF THE PAST

The pendulum is swinging. Landscape wall papers, after a seventy years’ truce, are on the warpath, to vanquish damask hangings and other fabrics that are traps for moths and dust and microbes, we old-time people aver. Now, in view of the return to favor of landscape wall papers, some elegant, expensive and striking specimens rise in my memory, and clamor to be once more displayed to the public.

I vividly remember a decorated wall at a school under the charge of a superannuated Episcopal clergyman. His aged wife must have possessed considerable artistic ability, for she painted, on the parlor walls, mythological subjects, as befits a school teacher’s, if not a preacher’s, residence. There were Diana and her nymphs (quite modestly wrapped in floating draperies) on one side the room, and opposite, was Aurora in her chariot, driving her team of doves. They were up in the dawning sky, and below was such greenery as I presume old Mrs. Ward thought belonged to the period of gods and goddesses, but it was strangely like the bushes and trees in her own back yard. Various other figures were floating or languishing about. The colors, on the whole, were not brilliant; in fact, artistically subdued. That bit of mural adornment was a curiosity to all. I, a little child, thought it most wonderful, and it was. All these landscape walls had a three or four-foot base of a solid color, surmounted by a band of wood, called in those days “chair boarding.” So the figures came near the level of the eye.

Years after the two old people had joined the immortals, I had occasion to call at the house. It was a great disappointment to find the parlor wall covered with stiff paper, representing slabs of white marble (marble, of all things, in that dingy red-brick house!). Aurora and Diana, and perhaps Calypso, for I imagine the scope was sufficiently extensive to comprise such a picturesque immortal, were buried under simulated marble. A weather-beaten portrait of Major Morgan in full uniform hung right over the spot where Aurora drove her fluttering birds. I looked at the desecration in dismay, when the voice of old black mammy was heard. “Dat is Mars Major in his rag-gi-ments; you never know’d him?” No, I didn’t. “And dat odder portrait over dar” (pointing to a simpering girl with curly hair) “is Miss Merriky ’fore she married de major.” Where are those old portraits now? The whirligig of time has doubtless whirled them away to some obscure closet or garret, where, with faces turned to the wall, they await a time when there will be a general cleaning up or tearing down—then where? Sic transit!

Typical Old New Orleans Dwelling.

I recall, in later life, a wonderful wall paper on the broad hall of Judge Chinn’s house in West Baton Rouge. That was very gay and brilliant, somewhat after the Watteau style, swains playing on impossible instruments to beauties in various listening attitudes; lambs gamboling in the distance, birds flying about amid lovely foliage, horsemen on galloping steeds with extraordinary trappings. How I did love that wall! It was never permitted the family to cover all that glory with “pillars and panels,” for the house, shortly after my visit, was destroyed by fire, and the debonair ladies, prancing steeds and all went up in one great holocaust.

The new house that rose over the ashes was aptly called Whitehall. It was all white, inside and out, broad, dead white walls, grand balconies all around the mansion dead white; white steps led to the lawn, and the trees surrounding had their trunks whitewashed as high as could be reached by a long pole and a brush. All the old portraits and some awful prints (it was long before the chromo era) were fished out of closets and other hiding places and hung about on the white walls. One old man with a tremendously long neck and a stiff black stock to help hold up his head, and a fierce look, had a pair of eyes that looked like great daubs of ink. His portrait decorated the parlor. I was warned not to handle the gilt-edged books and little trinkets on the marble-top center-table, “for your Cousin Christopher will see you; notice, whichever way you turn his eyes will follow you.” I was mortally afraid of that old spook till little black Comfort told me, “Laws! if dem eyes could hurt we’d all be’n daid in dis house.”

At “The Oaks,” Dr. Patrick’s plantation, the wall paper illustrated scenes from China, in colors not gorgeous, like the last mentioned, neither was the house so pretentious. There was no broad, high ceilinged hall to ornament with startling figures that seemed to jump at you. The orderly processions of pigtailed Chinamen in sepia tints could not by any possibility get on one’s nerves. Whole processions wended their way to impossible temples, wedding processions, palanquins, and all that; funeral processions dwindled away to a mere point in the distance, all becomingly solemn, until some of the irrepressible Patrick children, with black pencil, or charcoal, or ink, put pipes into all the mouths and clouds of smoke therefrom spotted the landscape. Moral suasion was the discipline of the Patrick children, so that freak was not probably followed by after-claps, but the Chinese were promptly marched off, and the inevitable white walls were the result.

Family portraits came forth to brighten the room. One notable one that superseded the Chinese wall paper was a full-length portrait of Gov. Poindexter’s (everybody knows “Old Poins” was the first Governor of the State of Mississippi) first wife, who was a sister of Mrs. Patrick. She was a vision of beauty, in full evening dress. Facing her was the glum, “sandy complected” Governor, not one bit fascinated by the sight of his wife’s smiling face.

The fashionable portrait painter of the time was Moïse; it was he who painted the author’s portrait shortly after her marriage. He was a dashing, improvident genius, and many of his portraits were executed to cancel debts. At one time he designed and had made for my husband, in settlement for a loan, a handsome silver lidded bowl with alcohol lamp beneath. It was known as a pousse café and was used to serve hot punch to after-dinner parties. I am glad to say it has survived all the family vicissitudes, and is an honored heirloom, in company with a repoussé silver pitcher, which we won as a prize for cattle at the Louisiana State Fair, described in a later chapter.

At John C. Miller’s place the house was only one story, but it spread over what seemed to be a half acre of land. A square hall, which was a favorite lounging place for everybody, had wall paper delineating scenes from India. Women walked toward the Ganges river, smilingly tripping along with huge water jars on their shoulders, in full view of another woman descending the steps of a temple, with a naked baby, poised aloft, to be thrown into the sacred Ganges. A crocodile ruffled the blue (very blue) waters, with jaws distended, ready to complete the sacrifice. That sacred river seemed to course all around the hall, for on another side were a number of bathers, who appeared to be utterly oblivious of their vicinity to the mother and babe, not to mention the awful crocodile.

The culmination of landscape wall paper must have been reached in the Minor plantation dwelling in Ascension parish. Mrs. Minor had received this plantation as a legacy, and she was so loyal to the donor that the entreaties of her children to “cover that wall” did not prevail. It was after that style of mural decoration was of the past, that I visited the Minors. The hall was broad and long, adorned with real jungle scenes from India. A great tiger jumped out of dense thickets toward savages, who were fleeing in terror. Tall trees reached to the ceiling, with gaudily striped boa constrictors wound around their trunks; hissing snakes peered out of jungles; birds of gay plumage, paroquets, parrots, peacocks everywhere, some way up, almost out of sight in the greenery; monkeys swung from limb to limb; ourang-outangs, and lots of almost naked, dark-skinned natives wandered about. To cap the climax, right close to the steps one had to mount to the story above was a lair of ferocious lions!

I spent hours studying that astonishing wall paper, and I applauded Mrs. Minor’s decision, “The old man put it there; it shall stay; he liked it, so do I.” It was in 1849 I made that never-to-be-forgotten trip to jungle land. The house may still be there; I don’t know; but I warrant that decorated hall has been “done over,” especially if little children ever came to invade the premises. Upon the departure of landscape wall paper, the pendulum swung to depressing simplicity of dead white walls or else “pillared and paneled,” which is scarcely one degree better.

Old portraits and any kind of inartistic picture or print were brought forth to gratify the eye unaccustomed to such monotony. Only a few years ago I asked: “What became of that military epauletted portrait of old Major Messiah that always hung in your mother’s hall when we were children?” “Oh, it was hanging twenty or more years ago in the office of a hardware concern down town. Don’t know where it is now.”

After the war, inquiring for a lot of portraits of various degrees of merit and demerit that disappeared when the Yankees left, we heard that some were in negro cabins in West Feliciana. So they come and are appreciated, those images of loved ones. So they often go, and are despised by those who follow us, and who, perchance, never knew the original. Now the questions arise, will landscape wall papers really return? And in their pristine splendor? Surely the scope in brilliancy and variety could not be excelled. The limit was reached almost seventy years ago, and naturally (I was a child then) comes as vividly to my mind as the counterfeit face of my ancestor with eyes following me all around the room. The tigers and ourang-outangs, even the den of lions and the crocodile of the Ganges, never made my little soul quake like the searching eyes of “my Cousin Christopher.”

XI
THOUGHTS OF OLD

I shall begin to think I am in my second childhood by and by. I have just been reading of a fashionable wedding where the bride and her attendants carried flat bouquets with lace paper frills. I don’t doubt the revival of the porte bouquet will come next, the slender bouquet holders made of filigree silver with a dagger like a short hatpin to stick clear through and secure the bouquet—a chain and ring attached to the holder and all could be hung from the finger. I used to think, a childish looker-on, that it was pretty to see the ladies in a quadrille “balancing to your partners,” “ladies changing,” etc., each with a tight little bouquet in a trim little holder swinging and banging about from the chain.

Later the porte bouquets were abandoned, but the stiff little posies, in their lacy frills, remained. They were symmetrical, a camellia japonica, surrounded by a tiny row of heliotrope, then a row of Grand Duke jasmine, one of violets, finally a soupçon of greenery, and the paper bed. James Pollock had a fund of such rare flowers to draw from, for though the Pollock home down on Royal street was the simplest of old Creole houses, flush on the street, only two steps from the banquette leading into a modest parlor, there was a tiny parterre in the rear, a vision of the most choice collection of plants. How it was managed and cultivated I don’t know, for it was hemmed in on all sides by buildings that intercepted much of the air and almost all of the sun’s rays. Still those camellias, Grand Dukes and violets thrived and bloomed, and delighted the heart of any girl to whom James, the best dancer in society, sent them in one of those tight little bouquets on the eve of a dance.

A Creole Parterre.

I have to-day a much larger parterre in my backyard, open to sun and rain and wind, but no amount of coddling brings anything better than dock-weed and tie-grass. I leave it to the climate of my own sunny Southland to explain the problem. The porte bouquet will no doubt come in time. I for one will hail an old friend, if I am “on deck” when it arrives.

Last Christmas what should my granddaughter receive but a mob cap of gold lace! almost exactly like one my mother wore before I can remember. Caps! Every woman when she arrived at middle age, and some who found them becoming at an earlier age, wore caps. My mother was considered very tasty and expert at cap-trimming. She had a papier mâché, or soft wood dummy head—I know she stuck pins into it—on which she fashioned her caps.

Mechlin lace (one rarely sees it now) was considered the fashionable cap lace. Remember cotton laces and Italian laces and machine-made laces were not in existence in those days, neither were Hamburg embroideries and Nottingham curtains, two awful products of to-day; and a thousand other make-believes, cheap and tawdry now. When mother’s fine Mechlin edgings became soiled she “did them up” herself, clapping the damp lace in her hands, pulling out and straightening the delicate edges—drying them without heat; and she had a deft way, too, of what she called “pinching” with her dainty fingers; she knife pleated it. The net foundation was fitted to the wooden head, the lace was attached in folds and frills, and little pink rosebuds or some other tiny flower scattered tastefully here and there. Behold a dress cap! One can imagine the care and taste and time and thought consumed in its manufacture. And how the old lady must have appeared when in full dress!

Many of those dames wore little bunches of black curls to enhance the effect, those tight, stiff little curls that looked like they had been wound on a slate-pencil. Dear Mrs. Leonard Matthews always wore the black curls. Even a few years after the war I met the sweet old lady, curls and all, jet black, tight little curls, and she looked scarcely older than in my earliest recollection of her.

Well, I must return to cap trimmings to tell of a bride. She must have been in the neighborhood of seventy, for she made what her friends called a suitable match with a widower long past that age. They came to the St. Charles Hotel on a kind of honeymoon trip. She decorated her head, oh, ye cherubim and seraphim! with a fussy cap sprinkled with sprays of orange flowers!

I, who revel in a towering white pompadour, have just had the present of a soft silk cap, with frills and bows. I presume it will be useful on the breezy piazzas of the mountains a week hence; but it looks to me now that the caps of our mothers and grandmothers are on the march hitherward. I possess a few “Moniteurs des Dames,” dated in the late forties, that contain pictures and patterns for “bonnets,” as they were called. Who knows but they may be useful yet?

Now, “in regard to” (as a lady we all know prefaces every remark)—“in regard to” frills, in my young days we had to make our own frills. Nobody had dreamed even of machine-made ruchings any more than of vehicles that run all over the streets without the aid of horses. We made our frills of lawn, neatly gathered on to a band, and what is more, they had to be fluted with hot irons. The making was not beyond everybody’s skill, but the “doing up” and fluting was way beyond me, as beyond many others. How queer it is, when we recall to mind the images of people so long absent that they are almost forgotten, the image presents itself, emphasized by some peculiarity of dress or speech. When I think of Dr. Bein’s daughter Susanna, whom I knew and loved so well, it is with the beautifully fluted frill she always wore and so excited my envy. Now, every Biddy in the kitchen and every little darky one sees wandering around wears handsomer frills than Susanna and I ever dreamed of.

Parasols had heavy fringes; so, to show to advantage, they were carried upside down, the ferule end fitted with a ring to be, like the bouquet holders, hung from the finger. My sister had a blue parasol, with pink fringe, that I thought too beautiful for words. How I should laugh at it now!

Best frocks, such as could be utilized for dinners and parties, were made with short sleeves, “caps,” they were called, and tapes sewed in the armholes; long sleeves similarly equipped were tied in under the “caps.” I used to see even party guests take off their sleeves as they put on their gloves to descend to the dancing room. Black, heelless slippers, with narrow black ribbons, wound over the instep, and crossed and recrossed from ankle, way up, over white stockings, were the style; it was a pretty fashion.

I recall the autumn of 1849, when I, a young girl, was at the Astor House, in New York. Coming downstairs one morning to breakfast, how surprised I was at glaring notices posted on walls and doors, “Hop to-night.” You may well believe I was at the hop, though I had no suitable dress. I was only a looker-on.

When I mentioned slippers I recalled that hotel hop, for Mme. Le Vert wore a pink silk dress and pink satin slippers, all laced up and tied up with broad pink ribbons. Nobody had ever seen the like before. Mme. Walton, her mother, was on hand, and hopped, too, just as spry a hop as any young girl. I contrived to sidle along and keep near to Mme. Le Vert, for I was as fascinated as any one of her numerous beaux. Dr. Le Vert, by the way, had just started on a trip to Europe for his health. Going to Europe then was like taking a trip to Mars now.

I heard Mme. Le Vert talking to four different swains in four different languages. I believe she considered her linguistic versatility her strong point. She surely was a most remarkable woman. She was as tender and sweet to me, a very plain, simple, unattractive girl, as to her swellest friends. One does not easily forget such an episode of early life. I never met Mme. Le Vert after that autumn. We all returned South together on the Crescent City, the pioneer steamer between New York and New Orleans.

I will not moralize or sermonize over these reminiscences. They are all of the dead past. Both fashions and people are gone.

XII
WEDDING CUSTOMS THEN AND NOW

We were lingering about the breakfast table having such a comfortable, chatty review of the last night’s party, when a familiar voice was heard. “Oh! congratulate me; we have captured him; they are engaged.” That was the first time I had ever heard an “announcement” from headquarters. It was made to Mrs. Slocomb, in her library. There followed many amusing particulars, audible to us, in the adjoining room, but we were discreet young girls; perhaps that was one reason we were among the very few invited to the wedding, which so quickly followed the engagement that it was a complete surprise to the whole community.

Sixty years ago only Catholics went to the sanctuary for a wedding ceremony. Protestant weddings were home affairs, necessarily confined to family and nearest friends. Houses being limited in space, company was limited in number. No city house could boast of a ballroom; few had “double parlors.”

At the wedding whose “announcement” was such a surprise to us, I think our family and the Slocombs were the only guests, except the families of the groom’s business associates. The idea of having a grand reception to announce a marriage engagement, to which everybody who is anybody is invited, was unheard of. The anxiety, too, of the parties interested to get the news in a suitable form in the daily papers, for the butcher boy and the sewing girl, out of the social swim, to read, accompanied by the genealogies of the engaged people, the wealth of the girl and how she came by it, and the numbers of clubs of which the young man is a member, as though the money and the clubs were “the chief end of man”, was unheard of, too. We did things on a very different scale sixty years ago!

I recall my astonishment when Elèna Longer told me her sister Héda was married the night before, for Elèna and I (we were ten years old at the time) had played together all that day of the wedding, and not a hint was imparted to me of the impending event. I had not even heard the name of Mr. Charles Kock, the fiancé, mentioned. There were already six married daughters, with hosts of children, at that time in the Longer family, so there could have been little room on such an occasion for outsiders, even if their presence had been desired.

Wedding presents were not made, either. The first time we saw a display of wedding gifts, how surprised we were, and how we wondered as to how it happened! There were not many, nor were they expensive, so for ever so long I could have given the list and the names of the donors. Dear Maria Shute, who, as I remember, was the bridesmaid, presented a pearl-handled paper cutter! That article might have escaped my memory, along with the others, but years after that wedding I met Maria, then Mrs. Babcock, and we talked of it all, and had a merry laugh over the paper cutter.

Fifty-eight years ago, when I married, I was surprised by a solitary wedding present, a napkin ring! From the most unexpected source it came. The giver is long since dead and gone; dead and gone also is the napkin ring.

At the wedding of Caroline Hennen to Mr. Muir, the first I ever attended, there were not a dozen guests, but the rooms were filled, indeed the Hennen family easily filled one of them. At this wedding we met Mr. William Babcock from New York, a forty-niner en route to California (this was in 1849). The following day I went with him to call on and introduce him to his young cousin, an intimate friend of mine he was desirous of meeting. She was of that handsome family of Smiths, a niece of Mrs. Labouisse. I never saw either him or her afterwards, for within the following fortnight they quietly married and started “round the Horn” to San Francisco. More than fifty years after I saw their children and grandchildren in California.

Some of us must remember genial, gossipy Mrs. Garnet Duncant, the bon vivant, so bright, so fat and so entertaining? She it was who called one day (sixty years ago) to tell us Amelia Zacharie had married her invalid cousin, and sailed away with him. Those two are the only cases I recall of wedding trips, and both were permanent trips, for there was no intention of a return to New Orleans of either couple. It was the fashion for the newly-mated to remain quietly in the home nest, until one of their very own be made ready for their reception.

James Pollock, I recall to mind, made a late appearance (in 1850) at a dance given by the Lanfears, on Julia street, that old “13 Buildings.” The Lanfears were the last to leave that once fashionable row. Pollock swept in late, full of apologies. His sister Mana had married that evening and he was detained.

The only other wedding trip I can chronicle was one where the bridegroom went alone. Do you remember what an excitement there was, years ago, when a wealthy young man disappeared from the side of his bride the morning after the wedding? There were no wires or wireless then to facilitate the hunt, undertaken with frantic haste, and continuing two mortally anxious weeks. He was eventually discovered, in a semi-conscious, dazed condition, on a wharfboat at Baton Rouge, or some such river town. He recovered from that attack, to be blown away by another “brain storm” a few years later. It was twenty years after this second disappearance that the courts pronounced him dead, and the widow permitted to administer on the estate.

In those days old maids were rare. Every girl, so to say, married. The few exceptions served to emphasize the rarity of an unmated female.

Divorces were so rare when I was young that they were practically unknown in polite circles. I know of cases, and you would know of them, too, if I mentioned names, where men sent their erring or cast-off wives, not to Coventry, but to Paris, and made them stay there. One such died in Paris lately at the age of ninety-five, who was packed off, under a cloud of suspicion. There was no divorce, no open scandal. She simply went and stayed! He simply stayed!

Last winter I was invited to a view (sounds like a picture exhibit!) of the trousseau and wedding gifts of a fashionable young lady. I was stunned with amazement! A large room filled to overflowing with glass, china, silver, mirrors, everything a body could require, and a vast array of utterly useless articles! and the trousseau which the tired mother, who has had nervous prostration ever since, spent months accumulating in Paris. My gracious! the best blanchisseuse in the land could not cope successfully with all that flimsy finery, laces and ribbons. I could only look and wonder, “What can all this lead to?” (I add here, anticipating events: It led to an apartment and one maid servant.) The young man was a salaried clerk, and the young girl utterly unfit to care for even the superabundance of china and silver, so much more than they could possibly find use for in a three-story house, not to mention a six-room apartment and “light housekeeping.” I wonder if the whirligig of time won’t bring back some of the simplicity of my day?

Already it is the style to “fire out of sight” the useless bric-a-brac ornaments that twenty years ago cluttered up drawing rooms till one had to pick her way carefully lest she stumble over a blue china cat, or tilt over a bandy-leg table covered with ivory idols and Chinese mandarins with bobbing heads. Some of the most fashionable drawing rooms to-day are already so stripped of furniture one has to wander around quite a bit to find a chair to sit on; not even a pier mirror to prink before, nor a parlor clock, flanked by “side pieces,” on the mantel. All that banished for stunning simplicity. Not so, however, the costumes and entertainments, which are becoming, so it seems to a near-sighted old lady, more and more luxurious. Perhaps this extreme (we all dote on extremes) of simplicity will come to take the place of many other equally absurd extremes of the present day. Qui vivra verra.

XIII
A COUNTRY WEDDING IN 1846

We missed the train! and here we were in the old Bayou Sara Hotel, looking for some kind of locomotion. We had eighteen miles to make, and if the Belle Creole had made the run we would have been all right, but the Belle Creole was not a flier; it had no time for arrivals or departures; it just jogged along at its own good will, answering every call, running all sorts of antics up and down the river. Dick started out to see what he could do.

I sat on the dirty porch, looking through November china trees towards the river. Is there anything more depressing than a view of china trees in November? The pretty, fragrant, blue flowers long gone, and the mocking birds (nobody ever heard of English sparrows then!) that had drunk their fill of intoxicating liquor from the scattering china berries were gone too. The train we had missed, the dear old Belle Creole always missed, was a kind of private affair. The whole outfit, about twenty miles of track, the lumbering cars, the antiquated engines, and I think, too, the scattering woods that supplied the fuel were all the private property of the McGehees. The McGehees had a cotton factory in the neighborhood of Woodville, twenty miles from the river. They had one train, cheap and dirty, that made one trip a day, going with freight very early in the morning, returning later, with freight and one small passenger car for the owner’s use. This concern stopped for wood and water and nothing else, and was the only means of transport for “casuals” like ourselves from the river to Woodville. Ladies going back and forth and gentlemen of leisure used their own conveyance, a turtle-back affair that was entered by a row of steps. The dear Belle Creole was too much of a convenience to have a time table, so it was useless to construct a time table and plan to “connect” with that equally free and easy train. Some disgruntled chap chalked on an unused car, left on the rails as a depot, “We belong to the McGehees, and go when we please.”

Well, to make the matter short, though it was long to me, on that dirty porch by the china trees, Dick found a man with a turtle-top coach, and a harness mended by cords and stakes and bits of rawhide. The man had a mended look, too, but he was sober, and for a good, round sum agreed to take us to Laurel Hill. Laurel Hill, where we proposed to go, was a post office station, about ten miles from Woodville and four miles across country. We meandered along, tired and out of all patience. At the date of this tramp I was a little girl and not given to moralizing. When we arrived at Laurel Hill we were told, “Creek is up; been a big rain somewhere; not even a horseman has crossed all day.” There was no accommodation for man or beast at the queer little depot, no place to sit and nothing to sit on. It was long after dark, and there was no one to tell us the story of the high water but a negro man, who was shutting up the one door of the building. There was nothing left us but to go to the nearest plantation house and ask for lodgings.

I was so tired I felt we had gone ten miles further when we reached Major Dick Haile’s, though it really was only a few miles. The tired horses and the sleepy driver made slow work. There was a gate and an opening, but the house was pitch dark, every door closed and everybody apparently asleep. The nags were willing to stand, unhitched, beside the fence; not an automobile or flying machine could have scared them; they were asleep, too.

After much knocking and calling at what seemed to be the door of entrance, an old gentleman, candle in hand and very scantily dressed, demanded to know what was wanted. My brother called that we were on our way to the General’s, and we could not cross the creek, so we begged the privilege of a lodging for the night.

“General’s for the wedding? Come right in.” A brighter light was procured, and before we were seated in the reception room we heard the hospitable voice, “Put your carriage under the shed, give those horses a good feed, then come to the kitchen and get a bite for yourself.” The two young daughters came in, hurriedly dressed (people did not have bathrobes and wrappers seventy years ago). I was awfully tired and awfully sleepy, and I began to think our lodgings were to be parlor chairs, long before the dining room door was opened, and the genial old gentleman, in night shirt and trousers, led the way to the table. We had fried chicken, hot cornbread, coffee, cakes, and I don’t know what else. It would take me back forty years to see a cook roused at midnight, to prepare such a meal. I presume she even took herself to the roost and caught her young chicken by the legs and wrung its neck before she reached the newly-made fire. Major Haile knew we had not broken our fast at the town hotel.

It was late the following day when we all assembled to just as fine a breakfast, and heard the major say, “Your ‘turnout’ is gone. I sent to see about the condition of the creek; it goes down about as fast as it rises. When you are rested my carriage is at your disposal. Your driver was not used to these roads, but mine knows every crossing in the creek.”

It was a four-mile drive, even after we had crossed the waters. The wedding house we found in commotion. There were no caterers or experts even in New Orleans in 1846. The wedding supper was in process of preparation, under the superintendence of a noted old cakemaker from Woodville, nine miles off. Everybody was busy; only General McCausland, the dear old master of the house, was quietly seated by his parlor window, a very old man, but a soldier withal, who could rise to emergencies when required. I drew up a chair and explained our delay, and told him how grandly hospitable his neighbor was. The two old men were the last remaining ones of their company of the battle of New Orleans. Their homes were in payment from the Government for their services. The dear old gentlemen said they were neither general nor major; they were simple soldiers who had discharged their services and accepted their pay. Both the men were Irish, both poor boys. They worked hard, soon exhausted the old red soil of their neighborhood.

Later the General moved his workmen to the river bottoms, so that, while living for health’s sake in the old home, the house of which he originally helped to build, his income came from Bayou Fordoche, many miles away.

Time flew; neighbors had arrived, the table was spread in the long back porch. The guests, many of them, lived miles and miles away, in common country roads, often through dense woods—a long drive under best circumstances, a perilous one at night, everybody waiting, everybody in a hurry, everybody getting tired and fretful. It was long after the appointed time, and the New Orleans preacher had missed the train! Old Dilsey in the kitchen was mad because her pig was getting too brown; Elfey in the porch worrying that her ice cream was waiting too long; ladies in the parlor trying to kill time; men wandering around the front yard in restless groups. Carriages had been to the depot; no appearance of Mr. Jahleel Woodbridge, the New Orleans minister. He was endeared to the family, had been for years their minister at Woodville. Bride, in all her regal attire, upstairs in tears; no Presbyterian preacher nearer than ten miles away. So we waited and waited. At last the General sent for his especial groom, ordered him to take the buggy and go four miles through the woods, where there was a Methodist itinerant, and tell him to come without delay to marry the couple.

The accommodating preacher came, just as he was. He had been plowing his field, and his wife, off to see a sick child, had carried the keys with her. He could not even get a clean handkerchief, but he came in his workaday suit. The company hastily assembled. He performed the ceremony, gave them his blessings, and congratulated her on her “escape from the quicksands and shoals of celibacy.” Recognizing his own condition at the time, he begged to be excused from refreshments, and took a rapid and hurried departure. The kindly man was scarce gone when Mr. Jahleel Woodbridge arrived in a coach, most astonishingly like the one we had used the previous day. Only a year or two later the hospitable Major passed away; shortly after the General followed him, and the dear old homes have passed away also from the face of the earth.

XIV
THE BELLES AND BEAUX OF FORTY

Do not think I mean to imply the belles and beaux of which I am about to speak were forty years old, but they had their butterfly existence in the year 1840. Some, no doubt, fluttered around before, and a few after that date, but they all were of that era of simple life that, alas! is of the distant past—a host, as Auctioneer Beard used to say when parading his goods, “too multitudinous to particularize.” In the first place, the costumes, as well as the customs of society, were so different from those of the present day that they marshal before my mind’s eye almost like a fancy dress parade.

Miss Ellen Johnson, who became later the wife of William B. Walker (of the firm of Woodlief & Walker), and her sister, Malvina, wife of our celebrated Dr. Warren Stone, wore the most beautiful curls—wore them long after that style ceased to be haut ton. I have some “Moniteurs des Dames” of that early date that afford insight into costumes then worn. The long pointed waist, chuck full of real, hard, stiff whalebones (all the whalebones must have been used up then; nobody can find one now), corset also whaleboned to the limit, laced at the back and with literally a board up the front, at least three inches wide—a real board, apple tree wood preferred, hard and stiff and unyielding. Ladies so girded up walked and stood and sat, too, like drum majors; no round, stooping shoulders; one just had to stand straight, with an apple tree board as a constant reminder. I used even to hear that in cases where the poise had a tendency to lapse it was not unusual for the victim to wear the corset night and day.

The tournure of 1840 was buried in such oblivion that it requires one to be almost eighty years old to drag it forth and display its hideousness, explain its construction. The tournure, called “tchuny” for short, was long and round, the size and shape of the biggest kind of a rolling pin, such as your cook uses for pastry. The ends, however, tapered to points, which met and were secured in front of the waist. It was stuffed with moss, or cotton, or hair, I don’t know what, for the monstrosity “came ready-made” from France. Over this awful precipice the full gathered dress skirt fell in rippling cascades. I remember a chiné silk, an indistinct, plaided purple and green; it was ruffled to the waist, and over the tchuny it hung in irregular folds. To my childhood’s eye it was most graceful and beautiful. Good-by, tchuny! I am sure you will never resurrect. Your reign was disastrous to taste. You lived one short decade; without a mourner when you departed. Good-by, tchuny!

Whatever did become of chiné silks? Can it be possible they are back on the counters masquerading under another name? I never see a silk now that bears any resemblance to the pretty chiné of 1840. Nor do I see tarletans of that date. It required a whole piece (or bolt) of that goods for a dress. It had to have at least three skirts, one over the other, to give the diaphanous effect. Such sweet, simple dresses they were, too. Miss Mary Jane Matthews, a belle of the forties, wore a pink tarletan, trimmed with wreaths of small white roses, that was an inspiration. One very striking one comes to mind, gold colored, garnished with red hollyhocks! I think some Western girl must have sported that; it was scarcely simple enough for Creole taste.

Emma Shields was a noted beauty. I recall a plaster bust of Queen Victoria, idealized beyond all reason or recognition, one of my brothers kept on a shelf in his room. He adored it because he saw a resemblance to beautiful Emma Shields. She, poor girl, married unfortunately, and dropped suddenly out of sight. About the same time an accidental flourish of a feather duster knocked Queen Victoria off the shelf—and smashed my brother’s idol.

Don’t I recall as though he stood before me this minute, on my father’s balcony, Mr. Peter Anderson? Tall and thin and angular (he imagined he looked like Henry Clay, and he was of similar build), dressed in what was known as moleskin, a tan-colored goods looking strangely like rough-finished kid, the trousers so skin-tight and so firmly strapped under the shoe that he had to assume a sitting posture with considerable deliberation and care.

Here comes Adolphus Hamilton, a quiet eligible, more known in business than in social circles, but the far-seeing mammas kept an eye on him, he was such a bon parti. One fine day he surprised these mammas by arriving with his bride from a trip to Natchez. Henry Hollister, too, was a business man who made few social calls, but was in evidence at all the dances. A few years ago I met his daughter at a summer resort. She was prodigiously amused that papa, now hobbling about with a gouty foot and stout cane, ever could have been a dancing beau.

George W. Kendall went off one fine day, to what he proposed would be a kind of picnic, in the wilds of Western Texas. His Santa Fe expedition spun out a longer and more varied experience than he contemplated, of which his graphic account, now unhappily out of print, is most entertaining. He married in France, and in Texas during the war we met him, after a lapse of many years. He had founded the town of New Braunfels, near San Antonio, and retired, full of years, and full of interest in the rough life around him, so different from the New Orleans of his earlier days and the Paris of his gayer ones.

The Miltenberger brothers were never old. They danced and made themselves admired through several generations of belles. The “sere and yellow leaf” could never be applied to a Miltenberger. Evergreens were they, game to the last, for no doubt they are all gone, and the places that knew them will know them no more.

A. K. Josephs, a lawyer of some note and a very acceptable visitor, was a replica in the way of flowered waistcoat and dangling chains of a prominent man of his race in England, Disraeli. Don’t I see a bird of paradise waistcoat? Indeed I do. And also a waistcoat of similar style sent to another prominent beau of the period, a black satin confection, with gorgeous peacocks embroidered on the ample front. I don’t think the recipient of that garment ever appeared in it. Flamboyant as were the waistcoats of that day, a peacock with spread tail was the limit. They are all dead, those belles and beaux of the forties. The old lady chronicler could expect nothing else of these folks she loves to remember and talk of to children and grandchildren, who listen with becoming patience, no doubt often thinking, “Dear grandma must be nearing her dotage.”

XV
AS IT WAS IN MY DAY

I am like the deaf old lady who, when asked why she took a box at the opera when she could not hear, replied, “I can see.” So it is on piazzas at summer hotels, I do not overhear remarks, so perforce the pleasure of gossip is denied me, but “I can see,” and no doubt do observe more than those who have the other faculty to play upon; also I see and moralize. Last summer in the mountains didn’t I see young girls, young society girls, educated girls who ought to have known better, with bare heads and bare arms playing tennis in the hot sun; and, worse still, racing over the golf links? I could see them from my window, equally exposed, chasing balls and flourishing clubs. The sun in August is pitiless even on those breezy mountains, so I was scarcely surprised when one young girl was overcome by heat and exposure, and was brought to her mother at the hotel in a passing grocer’s cart or lumber wagon. I tell my grandchildren who want to “do like other girls” that is not the way “other girls” did in my day. Grandma may be so old that she forgets, but she moralizes all the same. These athletic girls come back to city homes so sunburnt and with such coarse skin they have to repair to a skin specialist, and have the rough cuticle burnt off with horrid acids, and be polished up before the society season opens.

There are, of course, extremes, but years ago young ladies took more care of their complexions and of their hair, too. Years back of years, I don’t know how they did. In my day we girls loved to visit the granddaughter of a voluble dame and listen to the old lady’s talk, just like I am talking now. She thought we were criminally careless with our “skins,” as she called it. Why, when she was young, her skin was so thin and clear that “one saw little blue veins meandering her neck.” We always heard something as reminiscent in that house to laugh over till we saw the old lady again, and heard something equally remarkable of her youth. She was living in the past, as I am now, as I return to my experiences. One young girl visited me, ever so many years ago, who wore one of those awful, long, scoop sunbonnets all the time she was not at table or in bed. She looked like the proverbial lily. I used to wish she would take off that sunbonnet and say something, for she was dumb as a lily. I have entirely forgotten her name, though she was my guest for a whole stupid week; but I recall she was a relative or friend of the Morses. I don’t know Mr. Morse’s name; he was called Guncotton Morse, for he invented an explosive of that name, which the United States Government appropriated during the war.

Years after this young girl’s visit to me I called on the charming Morse family in Washington. He was then urging his “claim.” Every Southerner in Washington was after a “claim” at that time. I nearly broke my neck falling over a green china dog or a blue china cat in their dark parlor. Enterprising Morse barricaded himself behind his explosive, but I think he failed in his fight. I find I have wandered from the girls having their skins burned off to the Morses and their blue china cat!... In my days there were no specialists except cancer doctors. I think they always flourished—there were no skin specialists. A doctor was a doctor, nothing more nor less, and he was supposed to know all that was necessary of the “human form divine.” He did, too, for people did not have the new-fangled diseases of to-day. A woman’s hospital! Oh, heavens! Only last week I saw a friend, old enough to know better, but we never are so old we don’t want to rid our faces of pimples and warts and wrinkles. This friend was a sight. I was really alarmed for her. She had been to a specialist. Her face was fiery red, all the skin removed by acid. Yesterday I saw her again, cured of sunburn and all the ills skin is heir to. Her complexion was that of the lily girl who wore the scoop sunbonnet. I do not advise you to try the experiment. It is shockingly painful, and does not always prove a success.

When I was a little girl, more than seventy years ago, mother made me, for summer romps in the country, gloves of nankeen, that well covered the wrist, had a hole for the thumb and a deep flap to fall over the hand. It was lucky they were easily made, and nankeen was not expensive, for I hated them and had a way of losing them in the currant bushes. Maybe you never saw nankeen? Gentlemen’s waistcoats were often made of it, and little boys’ trousers. If I lost my scoop sunbonnet one day—and it was surprising how easily I lost it!—it was sewed on the next. There were no such things as hatpins—and we had pigtails anyway, so they would have been of no use. Such tortures were inflicted when we were running wild over the blue grass farm, but no doubt the little Creole girls on the lakeshore were similarly protected. The hair specialist was not in evidence either.

St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans.

Ladies had their hair done up with bandoline and pomatums made of beef’s marrow and castor oil and scented with patchouli; hair was done into marvelous plaits and puffs. A very much admired style which Henriette Blondeau, the fashionable hair dresser, achieved, was a wide plait surrounding a nest of stiff puffs. It was called the “basket of fruit.” The front locks were tiny, fluffy curls each side the face and long ringlets to float over the shoulders. We all remember Henriette Blondeau. She dressed my sister’s hair in the early forties, and she dressed mine ten years later, and I met her in the hall of the St. Charles Hotel, plying her trade, twenty years later still, the same Henriette, with the same ample apron, the tools of her trade sticking out from her pockets. Now, almost forty years later still, she walks the streets of New Orleans no more. I hope she rests somewhere in the old French cemetery, for she knew and gossiped with so many who are taking their long sleep in that peaceful spot.

Mother made—no doubt your grandmother did, too—the pomade that was used on our hair. It was used, too, very freely; our locks plastered down good and smooth and flat. You may wonder how long hair so treated could last; just as long as hair ruffled the wrong way and marcelled with warm irons lasts our girls to-day. Mother’s pomade was made of beef’s marrow and castor oil. After the marrow was rendered to a fluid state, oil was added, then perfume, the whole beaten in a deep bowl until perfectly cold and white. Mother would beat and beat, add a few drops more of essence of bergamot, smell and smell and beat and smell, until she had to call a fresh nose to see if it was all right. I remember being told to try my olfactories on the soft, creamy stuff. A naughty brother gave my head a blow that sent my little pug-nose to the bottom of the bowl! My face was covered to the ears, and while mother scraped it with a spoon and scolded Henry, she was entreating me not to cry and have tears spoil her pomade. Maybe I might have forgotten how the stuff was made and how it looked, but for that ridiculous prank of the dearest brother ever was.

I have a sweet little miniature of that brother Henry, namesake of my father’s dear friend, Henry Clay, with the queer collared coat and flourishing necktie of the day, and his long, straight hair well plastered with mother’s good pomade. The dear man went to Central America, on a pleasure tour to the ruins of Uxmal in 1844. The vessel on which he sailed for home from Campeache, in September of that year, disappeared in the Gulf. We never had any tidings of how, or when, or where. I remember the firm of J. W. Zacharie was consignee of that ill-fated Doric, and how tenderly Mr. Zacharie came to my stricken mother, and how much he did to obtain information, and how for weeks after all hopes were abandoned my mother’s heart refused to believe her boy was indeed lost. Every night for months she placed with her own trembling hands a lamp in the window of Henry’s room, to light him when he came. She never gave up some remnant of hope. So far as I know, only one friend of that dear brother, one contemporary, is living now, in New Orleans. She is the last of her generation; I am the last of mine.

In those days there were few patent medicines, washes and lotions. There was a Jayne’s hair tonic, and somebody’s chologogue, that was a fever cure much in evidence on plantations, for quinine and blue mass pills—others, too—were made by hand. I have made many a pill. We had an old negro woman who was daft on the subject of medicine. There was not an earthly thing the matter with Hannah—she was just a chronic grumbler, begging for “any kind of pill.” I doctored her successfully, making for her bread pills, rolling them in a little rhubarb dust to give them a nasty taste. They did her a world of good. Mother made our lip salve (didn’t your grandmother?) of white wax and sweet oil. We did not have cold cream in those days.

When by accident, or some other way, our faces tanned, a wash overnight of sour buttermilk was all that was required. It was not very pleasant, and nobody wanted to occupy the room with you on sour buttermilk night. Reason obvious. Kentucky belles, who were noted for their rosy cheeks, often increased the bloom by a brisk rubbing of the leaves of the wild mullein. Except rice powder (and that is not a cosmetic) no cosmetics were in use.

We can recall at a later date than my girlhood a lady from somewhere up the coast married a finicky cotton broker in New Orleans. They made a wedding trip to Paris, and she returned with her face enameled. I don’t think it could have been very skillfully done, for she had to be so careful about using the muscles of the face that she was absolutely devoid of expression. Once, in a moment of forgetfulness or carelessness, she “cracked a smile,” which cracked the enamel. She returned to Paris for repairs. I saw her on the eve of sailing, and do not know if she ever returned.

XVI
FANCY DRESS BALL AT THE MINT IN 1850

I have never heard of a society ball in a United States mint building, before nor since, but the Kennedys, who gave this one, were a power in the social world at that time—and ambitious beyond their means. Rose and Josephine, the two oldest of quite a flock of daughters, were débutantes that winter. Both were handsome and accomplished. Rose was also a famous pianist, even in those days when every woman strove to excel in music, and it was customary to entertain even a casual caller with a sonata. Gottschalk declared Rose Kennedy rendered his famous “Bamboula” better than he did himself, and to hear her was to rise and dance.

Who was at that fancy ball? Everybody who was anybody in the fifties. The Eustises—George and Mathilde, George as “a learned judge” (he was son of Chief Justice Eustis), and Mathilde in pure white and flowing veil was a bewitching nun. George, years after, married the only child of the banker-millionaire, W. C. Corcoran, in Washington. Mathilde married Alan Johnson, an Englishman; both are long since dead. There was Mrs. John Slidell, of “Mason and Slidell” fame, a “marquise,” in thread lace and velvet, her sisters, the Misses Deslonde, “peasant girls of France.” Mathilde Deslonde became the wife of Gen. Beauregard, and her sister, Caroline, married Mr. R. W. Adams. All three sisters are with the departed. Col. and Mrs. John Winthrop, “gentleman and lady of the nineteenth century,” the jolly colonel announced. Who fails to recall, with a smile, the Winthrops, who lived in Royal Street, near Conti; near neighbors of the—long departed—Bonfords? The genial colonel became a tottering old man, asking his devoted wife “who and where are we?” before he peacefully faded away. Young De Wolf of Rhode Island, nephew of Col. Winthrop’s, “an Arab sheik,” wore probably the only genuine costume in the room—a flowing robe that was catching in every girl’s coiffure, and every man’s sword and spurs, in the dance.

All the gilded youth who wanted boisterous fun, and no jury duty, were firemen, in those days of voluntary service. Philippe De la Chaise wore his uniform. He later married Victoria Gasquet, and was relegated to a “back number” shortly after.

I make no special mention of the chaperons, but, Creole like, they were present in force. Cuthbert Slocomb was a mousquetaire, and Augusta, in red and black, “Diablotan,” a vision of beauty and grace. She married the Urquhart mentioned in “Musical History of Louisiana,” as the father of Cora Urquhart Potter. Mr. Urquhart died years ago, but his widow survives. She lives with her daughter at Staines on the Thames, in a stone house that was a lodge of Windsor Castle in the time of Henry VIII. Cuthbert Slocomb married a Miss Day; his widow and daughter, Countess di Brazza, survive him. Ida Slocomb was the noted philanthropist of New Orleans, the widow of Dr. T. G. Richardson.

There was the stately Mrs. Martin Gordon chaperoning her exceedingly pretty sister, Myrtle Bringier, who became the wife of Gen. Dick Taylor, and whose descendants are among the few of those mentioned above still living and reigning in New Orleans society.

The mint building was made ample for the gay festivities by utilizing committee rooms, offices and every apartment that could be diverted for the crowd’s comfort—so, we wandered about corridors and spacious rooms, but never beyond the touch of a gendarme—officers, soldiers, policemen at every step. These precautions gave a rather regal air to the whole affair.

Augusta Slocomb Urquhart

Painted in Paris, in 1857

The belles retired to their boudoirs for a season, but the beaux had to go to business, and what a sight some of them were for a whole week after the fancy dress ball! They had hired costumes from members of the French opera troupe, and their faces were “made up” with rouge that could not be washed off; had to wear off in a purplish stain. My brother represented Louis XIV on that occasion, and I remember he scrubbed his cheeks until he made them almost raw. Of no avail. In time the pinkish, purplish tint gradually disappeared.

Shortly after that grandest and most unique entertainment Mr. Joe Kennedy’s term expired and he retired into private life. Beautiful Rose fell into a decline and died early. What fortunes befell that family I know not. They seem to have faded away. The Kennedys were a large family in those days, closely allied to the Pierce and Cenas families, all of which were socially prominent. And now their names are “writ in water.” I should like to know how many of this old Creole society are living to-day! I was eighteen, one of the youngest of the group, in the fifties.

XVII
DR. CLAPP’S CHURCH

It is quite sixty years since Dr. Clapp’s church went up in smoke. It was as well known to the denizens and visitors of New Orleans, in its day, as Talmage’s Tabernacle in Brooklyn some decades later was known far and wide. Dr. Clapp called it “The First Congregational Church of New Orleans.” Others designated it as “Clapp’s Church.” It was, in reality, neither one nor the other, for it was not an organized congregation, and its building was the property of an eccentric Jew. In a burst of admiration and generosity Judah Touro gave the church rent free to Dr. Clapp. The structure had quite the appearance of a “Friends’ Meeting House.” It was of unpainted brick, entirely devoid of any ornamentation. The little steeple was only high enough and big enough to hold the inevitable bell. One entered a narrow vestibule, with two doors leading into the body of the church, and two flights of stairs to respective galleries. It was further furnished with two conspicuous tin signs—“Stranger’s Gallery on the Right,” “Gallery for Colored Persons on the Left.” (Dr. Clapp came from Boston.)

On entering the sanctuary one faced the organ loft, the pulpit being at the street end between the two doors. It was a little rounded affair, with, to all appearances, “standing room for one only.” Back of it, to convey possibly an idea of space, and also to relieve the intense white of the wall, was a wonderful drapery, very high and very narrow, of red serge, pleated, looped and convoluted in an amazing way.

Dr. Clapp, a large, handsome, middle-aged man, in a clerical black silk robe, entered the pulpit from between the folds of that draped monstrosity. He was dignified and reverential, preached without notes, sometimes, but not always, using a Bible text. The music of that church was rated as very fine, the organ was the best in the city. (I wonder if old Judah Touro furnished that, too?) And Thomas Cripps, the organist, managed it, con amore. There must have been a choir to furnish the chorus, but I only call to mind Mrs. Renshaw and her sister, Miss White, who sang solos and duets. Their finely trained voices produced melody itself. Mr. James I. Day, tall, and thin, and gaunt, with a hatchet face, who looked as if a squeak was his vocal limit, had a most powerful bass voice that filled the building and floated out onto the street. The last time I saw him he was in an open carriage with a red velvet cushion on his lap, on which reposed the key (as big as the famous Bastile key) of the city of New Orleans. He was receiving Rex in an initial Mardi Gras parade. That was years ago.

To return to church, I don’t recall any prayer books or hymnals, nor hearing any congregational singing. The choir, of course, was volunteer. We had yet to know a church singer could be salaried. There was no church organization, as we know it to-day, or even at that day. There were no officers, no deacons, no elders, far as I can think, for my father was a devoted communicant and constant attendant and naturally would have fitted into some church office, if there had been any.

When Dr. Clapp announced the taking of a collection he cast his eye over the congregation and signaled from it those persons who were to “pass the plates.”

“Mr. Smith will take the center aisle, Mr. Jones the right aisle, Mr. Robinson the left aisle, Mr. Dick right gallery, Mr. Harry left gallery,” whereupon Messrs. Smith, Jones and Robinson and Messrs. Dick and Harry would come forward, take their plates from a table under the high pulpit and proceed to their allotted tasks. Remembering this confirms me in the belief there were no officers of the church whose duty it would have been to discharge such services.

There was only one service a week, a morning service and sermon on Sundays, no night meetings, as there was really no means of lighting the building. No Bible class, no Sunday school, no prayer meeting, no missionary band, no church committee, no Donors’ Society, no sewing circle, no donation party, no fairs, no organ recital, absolutely “no nothing,” but Dr. Clapp and his weekly sermon. The church was always filled to its utmost capacity. I recall a host of pew holders whose names have passed into oblivion with their bodies.

The old church stood on St. Charles Street, adjacent to the St. Charles Hotel, so when one building went up in flames the other did, too. The Veranda Hotel, next in importance to its neighbor, was across the way, and from these sources always came strangers, more than enough to fill the gallery, when they were wafted up the stairs by the conspicuous tin sign.

Almost simultaneously with the destruction of the building, disappeared both Dr. Clapp and Mr. Touro from public notice. By the way, Mr. Judah Touro never had been inside the church, nor had he ever heard Dr. Clapp preach. Of course, they are both as dead now as the unique old church, so it matters not how, when or where they departed. The congregation dissolved as completely. Probably not one member, old enough at the time to know what Dr. Clapp preached about or to be able to criticise his utterances, is living to-day. Dr. Clapp was a loyal citizen, a charitable, kindly man, one of the few who voluntarily remained in the city and ministered to the stricken and buried the dead in the fearful epidemics that ravaged the land every two or three years. His counsel reached the flotsam of a great city, and his teachings bore fruit. He is gone now where church organizations are not considered, but the good works he wrought by his simple methods are placed to his credit.

XVIII
OLD DAGUERREOTYPES

I think I can safely say I possess the first daguerreotype ever taken in New Orleans. An artist came there about 1840 and opened a studio (artist and studio sound rather grand when one views the work to-day). That studio was at the corner of Canal Street and Exchange Alley. The artist needed some pictures of well-known men for his showcase, so he applied to my father, who was of the “helping hand” variety. And dear Pa was rewarded with the gift of a picture of himself all done up in a velvet-lined case, which he brought home to the amazement and wonder of every member of the family, white and black. I look at it now with a grim smile. Dear Pa’s cravat ends were pulled out and his coattail laid nicely over one leg, and his hand spread so that one could see he had five big fingers. His head had been steadied straight up in a most unnatural position, with a kind of callipers or steel braces, and he must have been told to “look up and smile” for a full minute.

We prize that daguerreotype for its antiquity, but I hope seventy years hence when another and another generation opens my “war album” they will not laugh at the quaint cartes de visite it contains, though I confess some of them begin to look rather queer already. They were all gifts of near and dear friends, most of them with autograph attachments, some of which were so flourishing that I had to subscribe the names and dates on the backs.