DOWN “THE COAST”

The moon was gibbous in its approach to the full when the boat left Vicksburg. So all the way to their journey’s end the boys had moonlight of evenings except when fog obscured it briefly, and that was not often.

As they floated down the river, with subtropical scenery on either hand, with palms and live-oaks and other perennial trees giving greenery of the greenest possible kind at a season of the year when at their home not a leaf remained alive and all the trees were gaunt skeletons, the boys lived in something like a dream. And at night the moonlight, immeasurably more brilliant than any they had ever seen, additionally stimulated their imaginations and captivated their fancy.

“That is Baton Rouge,” said Ed, as they came within sight of a city on the left side of the river. “It means ‘red stick.’”

“Why in the world did anybody ever name a town ‘red stick’?” asked Irv.

“Why, because when Tecumseh came down this way to persuade all the Indians to join in a war upon the whites, as I told you up in New Madrid Bend, he offered red sticks to the warriors. All that accepted them were thereby pledged to join in the war. It was here that the first red sticks were distributed, and so this spot was called ‘Baton Rouge.’”

“But why didn’t they call it ‘Red Sticks’ and have done with it?” asked Will. “Why did they translate it into French?”

“The Indians didn’t know English,” answered Ed. “The French first explored the Mississippi, and they not only gave French names to everything, but they taught a rude sort of French to the Indians. There is a town on the upper Mississippi called ‘Prairie du Chien.’ That means ‘the prairie of the dog.’ Then there is ‘Marquette’ in Wisconsin, named after a great French missionary and explorer. And there is Dubuque, and there are half a dozen other places with old French names. In Arkansas there is a river called the ‘St. FranÇois.’ And the name Arkansas itself was originally a French effort to spell the Indian word ‘Arkansaw.’ By the way, the Legislature of that state has passed a law declaring that the proper pronunciation of the state’s name is ‘Arkansaw.’ It is said that when James K. Polk, afterward President, was speaker of the House of Representatives, there were two congressmen there from Arkansas. One of them always pronounced his state’s name ‘Arkansas,’ as if it were English, and with the accent on the second syllable, while the other always called it ‘Arkansaw.’ Polk was so excessively polite that when either of the two arose to speak, he recognized him as ‘the gentleman from Arkansas’ or as ‘the gentleman from Arkansaw,’ accordingly as the gentleman recognized was in the habit of pronouncing the word.”

“That’s interesting,” said Phil. “And I suppose the same thing is true about the ‘Tensaw’ country in Alabama. I see that it is spelled on most maps ‘Tensas,’ but on some it is spelled ‘Tensaw,’ and I suppose that is the right pronunciation.”

“It is,” said Ed. “And then there is the Ouachita River. Its name is pronounced ‘Washitaw,’ but spelled in the French way. I once heard of a man who stayed in New Orleans for six weeks, looking every day for the advertisement of some steamboat going up that river. He saw announcements of boats for the Ouachita River, of course, but none for the ‘Washitaw.’ Finally, somebody enlightened him. You see these French names were bestowed when French was the only language of this region, and they have survived.”

The boys were studying the map by the almost superfluous light of a lantern. Presently one of them said:—

“A little way down the river, on the western bank, is a place called Plaquemine. That also is French, I suppose?”

“Certainly,” answered Ed, “and it is a region with an interesting history. It was there that the Acadians went when they were driven out of their home in British America. Longfellow tells all about it in the poem ‘Evangeline.’ I’ll read some of it,” he added, rising to go below for the book.

“No, don’t,” pleaded Irv. “That poem gives me ‘that tired feeling.’ Its story is beautiful. Its sentiment is all that could be desired. But its metre makes me feel as if I were stumbling over stones in the dark.”

“I’ll bet your favorite wager, a brass button, Irv, that you can’t quote a single line of the poem you are so ready to criticise,” said Will Moreraud, who was Longfellow mad, as his comrades said.

“Well, I’ll take that bet,” said Irv. “And I’ll give you odds. I’ll bet seven brass buttons to your one that I can, off hand, repeat the worst and clumsiest four lines in the whole poem.”

“Go ahead,” said Will. “I’ll buy a glittering brass button in New Orleans, ‘scalloped all the way round and halfway back,’ as the boy said of his ginger cakes, and pay the bet if I lose.”

“All right,” said Irv. “Here goes:—

“It really doesn’t sound like poetry,” said Phil. “But then, I’m no judge. All the same, Irv wins the bet, and I’ll exercise my authority as commander of this craft and company to compel you, Will, to buy and deliver that brass button.”

“But how do you know that those four lines are the worst in the poem?” asked Will.

“Because there simply couldn’t be worse ones,” said Phil, “and unless you produce some others equally bad, I shall hold these to be the worst.”

“Now,” said Ed, “you fellows are very free with your criticisms. But perhaps you don’t know as much as you might. Longfellow undertook to write in hexameters. We all know what hexameters are, because we have all read some Latin poetry. But there is this difficulty: a hexameter line must end in a spondee—or a foot of two long or equally accented syllables. Now there is only here and there a word in the whole English language that is a spondee. The only spondees available in English are made up of two long, or two equally accented monosyllables. That is why the metre of Evangeline is so hard to read with ease, or at any rate it is one of the reasons. Longfellow uses trochees—that is to say, feet composed of one long and one short syllable, instead. In one case he uses the word ‘baptism’ as a spondee, but in fact it is a dactyl, consisting of one long and two short syllables. Edgar Allan Poe pointed that out.”

“Why did he write in that metre, then,” asked Will, “if it is impossible in English?”

“Because he was a Greek and Latin scholar, and was so enamored of the hexameter verse that he tried to reproduce it in English. He didn’t accomplish the purpose, but he wrote some mighty good things in trying to do it.”

“But tell us, Ed,” said Constant, “why did Evangeline’s people come all the way down here?”

“They were French, and they naturally sought for a country where the French constituted the greater part of the population. This wasn’t English territory then. By the way, that reminds me of a good Vevay story. When I was a very little boy, I used to go occasionally to pay my respects to the oldest lady in town—‘Grandmother Grisard,’ as we all reverently called her. She was a lovely old lady, and she once told me how she came to Vevay. She set out from Switzerland very early in this century, being then a young girl, to come to this French-settled Red River country, where her people had friends. But there are two Red Rivers in America, this one and the Red River of the North, which runs from Minnesota northward into Manitoba. Europeans were rather weak on American geography in those days, so instead of bringing this young girl to the Red River of Louisiana, the transportation people took her to the Red River of the North. That region was then entirely wild. Indians and Canadian half-breeds were practically its only inhabitants, and so the young Swiss girl was in the greatest peril.

“She learned, after a while, that some Swiss people had settled at Vevay, in what was then the wild, uninhabited Northwest Territory. So she set out to find Vevay, and to find people that could talk her own mother tongue. It was an awful journey across the wild, savage-haunted prairie region that now constitutes Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, but she made it. It required months of time. It involved terrible hardships and fearful dangers from the Indians. But after the long struggle the young Swiss girl reached Vevay and was again among people of her own race, who spoke her own language. She soon after married the most prosperous man in the village, Mr. Grisard, and, as you all know, her sons and her grandsons have ever since been men of mark in the town.”[3]

“Good for you, Ed!” said Will Moreraud. “We fellows of Swiss descent thank you. We are all more or less akin to Grandmother Grisard, after two or three generations of intermarriages, and now that we know her story we shall cherish it as a family legend of our own. In fact, I suspect that our Swiss forefathers and foremothers made a pretty good place out of Vevay before the Virginians and Yankees and Scotch-Irish from whom you fellows sprang ever thought of settling there.”

“Of course they did,” said Ed; “that’s why our people settled there. The Swiss settlers must have been people of the highest character, or their descendants wouldn’t be the foremost citizens of the town, as they are to-day. It is a curious fact, by the way, that when they settled at Vevay they tried to do precisely what they and their ancestors had always done in their own country,—they planted vineyards, and set out to make wine. My father, before he died, told me that in his boyhood four-fifths of the lands cultivated by the Swiss were planted in vineyards. Henry Clay was greatly interested in their work, and tried hard to introduce Vevay wine in Washington, and to secure tariff protection for it.”

“What became of the vineyards?” asked Constant.

“Why, the temperance wave destroyed them. It came to be thought wrong, and even disreputable, to make or sell wine, or anything else that had alcohol in it. So, little by little, the Swiss people, who were always, above all things, reputable and moral, dug up their vineyards, and planted corn instead.”

“Yes,” said Will Moreraud. “I remember hearing a rather pretty story on that subject concerning a kinsman of my own. He had his dear old grandmother—or great-grandmother, I forget which—as an inmate of his house, and when the movement to convert the vineyards into cornfields was at its height, the old lady strenuously objected. She said that she had been born in a vineyard, and had all her life looked out upon vineyards through every window. My kinsman was very tender of his grandmother’s feelings. But at the same time he was resolved to change his vineyards into cornfields. He knew that the old lady could never leave the house, owing to her great age and infirmities. So he went to every window in every story of the house and studied the landscape. Having ascertained precisely how far it was possible for the old lady to see from the windows of the house, he ordered all the vineyards beyond her line of vision destroyed, and all within it preserved.”

“Beautiful!” cried Phil. “There ought to be more men like that one, if only to make the dear old grandmothers happy in the evening of their lives.”

“Perhaps there are more of them than you think,” said Constant. “It’s my impression that men generally are pretty good fellows, if you really find out about them.”

“Of course they are,” said Ed. “Does it occur to you that when we fellows undertook this flatboat enterprise, every man in Vevay stood generously ready to help? It is always so. Men are usually kindly and generous if they have a chance to be. As for women—”

“God bless them!” cried Irv, rising to his six feet of height.

“So-say-we-all-of-us!” chanted Phil, to the familiar tune, while the rest joined in.