I entered the car, threw my grip between two seats and sat down by a
drummer. He looked at my valise and then at me and dryly asked, “Are
you a traveling man?” “Yes,” was my reply. “What is your line?” asked
he. “_Sweetened wind_,” quoth I. A smile lighted his face as he quickly
asked, “Preacher or lecturer?” And then there was a laugh and a lull.
After an all day’s travel which wore me into a frazzle, I reached my
destination at 8.30 P.M. It was a cold, drizzling evening. The skies
were leaking spray, and in the language of Mrs. Partington, the street
was a perfect “lullaby” of soft and sticky mud. The little freckle-faced
dreamer who had bought me for a hundred and fifty caught me by the arm
with one hand as I stepped off the cars and seized my grip with the other
and literally pushed me head foremost into a Jim Crow hack drawn by one
old spavined horse,
With one eye out and t’other blind,
He racked before and paced behind,
until we reached the hall where I was to lecture. I found a little cold
and shivering crowd seated there, waiting to be warmed by my eloquence,
and without a chance to make my toilet and don my little “swallow tail,”
I was ushered on the stage and introduced as the greatest orator,
philosopher, poet, musician, statesman, scientist, actor and artist that
ever came down the pike, whereupon I began to shake my jaw and pour out
my metaphors; but somehow or other my eagle wouldn’t soar that night. He
flopped his cold and flabby wings and rose and fell for an hour and a
quarter. The audience departed like mourners from a funeral; but one good
old lady lingered in the hall till I came off the stage and in her pity
she sidled up to me and whispered, “I liked your little talk right well.”
I found the freckled-face dreamer waiting at the door, and, cold as it
was, the sweat was rolling down his cheeks. His face was the picture of
despair when he handed me a hundred dollar bill and ten fives. I knew
that his castle in the air had fallen. “How did you come out?” I asked.
“Well, Governor,” he said, with a tremulous voice, “I’m out just eighteen
dollars.” I took the roll he had given me out of my pocket and skinned
off four bills in the light of the lamp dimly burning and said, “There
are twenty dollars, my boy, and my blessing upon you.” He almost shouted
and pressed my hand continuously as we walked through the mud to the
little hotel on the starvation plan. Then there were a brief sleep and an
easy conscience. I crossed the Father of Waters in triumph next morning
and tarried in Memphis till the next train out. I went to the bank to buy
New York exchange, took out my roll and lo! I had given old freckle-face
the one hundred dollar bill and three fives. Then again there was a laugh
and a lull—he laughed and I lulled. I pocketed my laugh and my loss
and climbed into the pouch of a Southern Kangaroo on wheels and with
a single hop I cleared the state of Mississippi and lit in Alabama. I
climbed out and got into the ’bus in a beautiful little town among the
blushing hills. Before I had washed the dust of travel from my brow, a
spider-legged dude, with ambrosial locks curled and parted in the middle,
came strutting like a clean-shaven and musk-scented dream into the dingy
and time-honored little room where my valise and I were safely deposited,
and with Chesterfieldian bow and a fluted voice announced that he had
been designated by the ladies to introduce me that night to the audience.
He shook his curls and said, “Governor, I have never delivered a speech
in my life, but I have been at work on this one for about two weeks; and
pardon me for saying that I think she’s a daisy.”
“Well, my friend,” I said, “I am fond of daisies.” With another shake
of his locks he said, “The society people are all coming out to-night
to hear me introduce you.” I shook my scanty locks and said, “I am glad
there is something bringing them out.”
The clock struck 8. An elegant carriage stopped at the hotel door where
I was waiting, and the sweet-scented dream in full evening dress,
emerged, and gently took me by the arm and ushered me into it. We went
whirling to the stage entrance of the theater, but as we walked up the
stairs I observed that he tottered like a man ascending the gallows and
his lips were colorless and quivering. We took our seats side by side
behind the curtain. I motioned to the curtain man that all was ready,
and with a whiz and a bang the curtain went up, and, sure enough, there
in front of us, in the brilliantly lighted auditorium, was a breathing
bouquet of youth and beauty and old age which greeted us with a storm of
applause—the society folks had indeed come out to hear him introduce me.
I nudged my friend and said, “Shoot.” He never budged. I nudged him again
and said, “Go ahead!” He never budged. I looked around and his face was
as white as a sheet and great drops of perspiration like beads of pearl
were standing on his pallid brow. I said again, “Go ahead!” and in his
agony he mumbled with muffled voice, “Governor, she’s gone.” There was
a lull and a laugh, and in about two seconds he was gone. Before I had
delivered half my sweetened goods I observed a number of yawns and stolen
glances at watches and increasing signs that my crowd wanted to go. There
is no anguish like that which a lecturer feels when his listless audience
turns to frost and nips all his flowers of speech. The saddest spectacle
in all the tide of time is a frost-bitten orator. He gathers up his
little withered tropes and similes and vanishes, and all that saves him
from suicide is the dream that he will blossom again in a more congenial
garden. I collected my tribute money in the Alabama town and mounted a
grasshopper train and went hopping and stridulating from rail to rail
until I found a patch of clover in a rich and aristocratic Georgia town
where I lounged and exchanged anecdotes with traveling men and with
the natives until the lights were turned on and I stood all robed in
my “swallow tail,” in the midst of as delightful an audience as ever
listened to a sap-sucker speech or laughed at the unwinding of my little
ball of yarns. A tall and handsome Georgia lawyer rose to introduce me
and thus he spake:
“Ladies and Gentlemen: I have traveled a great deal in my life and on
one of my journeys I took in the mountains of East Tennessee. I paused
in that peculiar country to study the customs of that peculiar people.
They make maple sugar in East Tennessee. They have great sugar orchards
there, and one of the customs of the people is to tap the sugar trees
in the spring when the sap begins to rise and they give the children in
the family a tin cup and turn them out into the sugar orchard and never
see them any more for six weeks. I have the pleasure to introduce to you
to-night a sap-sucker from East Tennessee!”
There was a lull and a laugh,
And the sap began to run,
And they kindly took a quaff
From my sugar-trough of fun.
I settled with the secretary of the treasury and mounted a March hare
train and sped away through many a cotton patch, from town to town, out
of Georgia into the Old North State, and, flanking Charlotte, squatted at
the State University at Chapel Hill, that classic spot of earth so rich
with memories of the glorious past and still teeming with joyous student
life, like those who have gone before, dreaming of the glorious future.
There I met Dr. Battle, that grand old man who has fought a thousand
battles for enlightenment and human happiness. There I met Alphonso
Smith, one of the South’s foremost young men in the field of educational
endeavor and whose soul is in tune with Southern progress and Southern
development.
There, too, I met Eben Alexander, a brilliant star from the sky of
Tennessee, shedding the soft light of Grecian literature upon the
youthful brain of Carolina. I met a score of other stars in the faculty
of this great University. I stood on the platform of its splendid
auditorium and tossed bouquets at as refined and cultured an audience as
ever sipped sap from a sugar tree. And when I packed my grip and started
Southward I could not repress the sweet old song:
“Hurrah! hurrah! for the Old North State forever!
Hurrah! hurrah! for the good Old North State!”
Finally, I landed in Charleston, South Carolina, where I played
Beauregard, but instead of firing bomb shells at Ft. Sumter, I fired
soap bubbles at the heads and hearts of a magnificent audience of
representative Charlestonians; and whether I pleased them or not, they
were so generous and hospitable as to flatter me with occasional bombs of
laughter and a few volleys of applause.
I swung back through Alabama to my home in Nashville, on hearing the
news that the political sap was rising; but, alas! only to find that the
Tennessee sugar tree was already tapped, you see, and that the senatorial
sugar-trough was full of sap-suckers holding a snap caucus, and there was
a lull and a laugh—I lulled and they laughed. When I awoke from my lull
I kissed my wife and children good-bye, and broke for Texas, the queenly
young sister of Tennessee, who took me in her arms, and brushing away my
political tears, pressed me to her loving heart.
There is no state in the Union that gives a Tennesseean a warmer welcome
than Texas, because her lap is full of Tennesseeans, and, moreover, she
is naturally hospitable and kind. There is a place on her fat knee for
every troubled soul, a kiss of sunshine on her lips and a lump of sugar
in her hand for every weeping wanderer.
O, glorious empire state of the sun-kissed South, with thy hundred and
seventy-five thousand square miles of as rich a country as was ever
tickled by the plow or the pick, and as ever laughed a harvest of cotton
and grain for the comfort and happiness of man! With thy cattle on a
thousand hills, thy countless flocks, thy gushing wells of oil, thy
fields of rice and sugar cane stretching far away like the sweet fields
of Eden on the other side of Jordan! With thy fatness thou canst feed
and warm the world! I wonder why the poor huddle in the smoke and filth
of crowded cities when Texas smiles and beckons them to her landscapes
of beauty, where the prairie flowers bloom and the sunshine plays with
the zephyrs from the Gulf and sometimes scuffles with a cyclone. I
wonder why toiling millions dwell amid blackened walls only to be slaves
to heartless masters, when untouched fields invite the happy home and
virgin soil still waits for the plowman and his merry song. I wonder why
helpless children are doomed to die by thousands in polluted hovels and
crowded alleys, when the green meadows of Texas bid them come and chase
the butterflies among the bluebells and the daisies, and the blossoming
hills call them hither to romp and play where the happy birds sing and
the cows come home in the evening fragrant with the breath of alfalfa and
the sweet wild grasses of the plains. Texas is a Paradise for the poor,
it is a third heaven for the rich.
But I am about to forget that I was talking about my lecture tour. Let me
see!—O, yes!—“All aboard for Nashville!” the conductor cries. Well, the
rest of my story I will tell around the happy hearthstone of home.