第112章 Southern Sports(2)

The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds,wipe them off,blow cold water on them in a fine spray,and take their heads in their mouths and hold them there a moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps;I do not know.Then,being set down again,the dying creatures would totter gropingly about,with dragging wings,find each other,strike a guesswork blow or two,and fall exhausted once more.

I did not see the end of the battle.I forced myself to endure it as long as I could,but it was too pitiful a sight;so I made frank confession to that effect,and we retired.

We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring,and fighting to the last.

Evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport'for such as have had a degree of familiarity with it.I never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight.

The case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten.

They lost themselves in frenzies of delight.The 'cocking-main' is an inhuman sort of entertainment,there is no question about that;still,it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the cocks like it;they experience,as well as confer enjoyment;which is not the fox's case.

We assisted--in the French sense--at a mule race,one day.

I believe I enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there.

I enjoyed it more than I remember having enjoyed any other animal race I ever saw.The grand-stand was well filled with the beauty and the chivalry of New Orleans.That phrase is not original with me.

It is the Southern reporter's.He has used it for two generations.

He uses it twenty times a day,or twenty thousand times a day;or a million times a day--according to the exigencies.

He is obliged to use it a million times a day,if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often;for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one.

He never tires of it;it always has a fine sound to him.

There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul.If he had been in Palestine in the early times,we should have had no references to 'much people' out of him.No,he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry of Galilee'assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount.

It is likely that the men and women of the South are sick enough of that phrase by this time,and would like a change,but there is no immediate prospect of their getting it.

The New Orleans editor has a strong,compact,direct,unflowery style;wastes no words,and does not gush.Not so with his average correspondent.

In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter,penned by a trained hand;but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that.

For instance--

The 'Times-Democrat'sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous,last April.

This steamer landed at a village,up there somewhere,and the Captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him.

They accepted and came aboard,and the steamboat shoved out up the creek.

That was all there was 'to it.'And that is all that the editor of the 'Times-Democrat'would have got out of it.There was nothing in the thing but statistics,and he would have got nothing else out of it.

He would probably have even tabulated them,partly to secure perfect clearness of statement,and partly to save space.

But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics.

He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them--'On Saturday,early in the morning,the beauty of the place graced our cabin,and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.'

Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved out up the creek,is a clean waste of ten good words,and is also destructive of compactness of statement.

The trouble with the Southern reporter is--Women.They unsettle him;they throw him off his balance.He is plain,and sensible,and satisfactory,until a woman heaves in sight.Then he goes all to pieces;his mind totters,he becomes flowery and idiotic.

From reading the above extract,you would imagine that this student of Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice,and knows next to nothing about handling a pen.On the contrary,he furnishes plenty of proofs,in his long letter,that he knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint.

For instance--

'At 4o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east,and presently from the Gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment.

It was not safe to leave the landing then,and there was a delay.