RED-LETTER DAYS IN NEW ORLEANS

Once comfortably settled at the little hotel near Dryades Street, the boys proceeded to equip themselves for seeing the city. They bought a new suit of clothes and a hat apiece, together with such underclothes, linen, shoes, and socks as they needed. Indeed, they bought more than was necessary for their immediate wants, because they would need the clothes on their return home, and they could buy them much cheaper in New Orleans than in Vevay. Phil decided to indulge himself in an overcoat, the first that he had ever owned, and the others followed his example.

“Not that we are likely to need overcoats very pressingly in New Orleans at this autumn season,” said Irv, “but I for one have a lively recollection of how cold it is in Vevay every winter.”

By appointment they called at the office of Mr. Kennedy, the commission merchant, the next day, for a settlement. He furnished them with carefully detailed accounts, made out by his bookkeepers, and gave them drafts on New York for the money coming to them.

“You’d better send your drafts by mail to your home bank,” he said. “If you need any money for your expenses while here, I’ll furnish it, and you can remit it from home.”

“Thank you!” responded Phil. “We shan’t need any money for expenses here. We’ve enough left of the money we started with, which we call our ‘campaign fund,’ for that. But how about our passage home? Do you happen to know, sir, about how much that will cost us?”

“Whatever you choose to make it cost you, from nothing at all up,” answered the merchant.

A query or two brought out this explanation:—

“You’ve dropped some hints in our conversations”—for he had talked with them at their hotel the evening before—“concerning your educational plans, and I gather that you want to keep all you can of the money you have made.”

“Precisely!” said Phil. “Except that we mean to stay here for a week to see all we can of the city, we don’t intend to spend a dollar that we can save.”

“So I thought,” said the merchant. “I have therefore taken the liberty of making some inquiries for you. It happens that I am freighting a steamboat with cotton, sugar, molasses, coffee, and fruits, for Louisville. The captain is a good friend of mine. As he will have no way-freight,—nothing to put on or off till he gets to Louisville, where the stevedores will unload the boat,—he has very little for deck hands or roustabouts to do. But there will be some ‘wooding up’ to do now and then,—taking on wood for the furnaces,—and there will be the decks to keep clean, the lanterns to keep in order, and all that sort of thing. Now as you young men are stout fellows and pretty well used by this time to roughing it, he has agreed, if you choose, to take you instead of the roustabouts and deck hands ordinarily carried. There won’t be any wages, but you’ll have your meals from the cook’s galley and your passages to Louisville free. Passage from there to Vevay will be a trifle, of course.”

The boys were more pleased with the arrangement than they could explain in words. But Phil tried to thank Mr. Kennedy, ending by saying, “I don’t know why you should take so much trouble for us, sir, as we’re complete strangers to you.”

“You don’t know why?” asked the merchant, with smiles rippling over his face. “Well, let me tell you that the man you rescued from a horrible death up there in the Tallahatchie swamp is my brother-in-law, the woman you saved is my sister, and the children my nephew and nieces. Now you will understand that whatever you happen to want in New Orleans is yours, if I know of your wanting it. We should all be more than glad to do vastly more for such good friends as you if we could. But my brother-in-law writes me that he talked with you about that, and concluded that boys of your sort are likely to do much better for themselves than anybody can do for them. Now, not a word more on that subject, please,” as Ed, with his big eyes full of tears, arose, intending to say something of his own and his comrades’ feelings. “Not a word more. Besides, there’s a clerk waiting for me at the door. Go to the opera to-night, and hear some good music. One of my clerks will leave tickets at the hotel for you. And be ready at noon to-morrow for a drive. I’ll call for you, and show you our town. Good-by now, good-by—really, I mustn’t talk longer. Good-by.”

And so the overwhelmed youngsters found themselves bowed out into Camp Street without a chance to say a word of thanks.

The next day, in two open carriages, Mr. Kennedy drove the boys for hours over the beautiful and picturesque old city—up into the Carrollton district, where are fine residences and broad streets; down through the French Creole region, where the quaintness of the city is something wholly unmatched in any other town in America; and out over a beautiful road to Lake Pontchartrain, with luncheon at the Halfway House.

“This will be enough for to-day,” said their host, as they rose from their meal. “To-morrow morning, if you young gentlemen like, we’ll drive down to the battlefield, where Jackson won his famous victory and saved the Mississippi River and all the region west of it from British control. We’ll drive into the city now, and you would do well to rest this afternoon, for driving in this crisp autumn air makes one tired and sleepy.”

The boys protested that he was unwarrantably taking his time for their entertainment, but he had a way of turning off such things with a laugh which left nothing else to be said.

So the trip to the battlefield was made, but this time they had a second companion in the person of a young professor from Tulane University, whom Mr. Kennedy had pressed into service to explain the battlefield and all the events connected with it.

On the following day Mr. Kennedy took his young friends down the river on a little steamer, on board which they passed a night and two days, seeing the forts and hearing from the professor the story of the part they had played in Farragut’s celebrated river fight, and visiting the jetties—those stupendous engineering works by which the government deepened the mouth of the river so as to permit large ships to come up to the city.

On the way back from this two days’ trip Mr. Kennedy invited the boys to dine with him at his home on the next evening. With a queer smile upon his lips, he said:—

“I ought to have asked you to my house sooner, perhaps, but I wasn’t ready. There were some little details that I wanted to arrange first.”

When the dinner evening came, the boys entered the stately mansion with more of embarrassment than they would have cared to confess. It was the finest house they had ever seen,—a stately, old-fashioned structure, with broad galleries running around three of its sides, and with a spacious colonnade in front. It stood in the midst of a garden of palm, ilex, and magnolia trees, occupying an entire city block, and shut in by a high brick wall, pierced by great gateways and little ones.

Inside, the house was luxuriously comfortable, filled with old-fashioned furniture, time-dulled pictures, and here and there a bit of statuary, but with none of that painfully breakable looking bric-a-brac that one finds so often and in such annoying profusion in the houses of the rich or the well-to-do. There was nothing here that meant show, nothing that did not suggest easy use and comfort.

Mr. Kennedy himself followed the servant to the door to receive his young friends. When he had ushered them into a homelike, “back-parlor” sort of a room, he excused himself for a brief time and left them. About a minute later they heard little feet pattering down the great hall, and, an instant later, “Baby” toddled in. She paused a moment, and then rushing into Phil’s arms called aloud:—

“My boys! My big boys!” Then she raised her little voice, and cried:—-

“Come, papa! Come, mamma! My boys is come!”

This was the “little detail” that Mr. Kennedy had waited to arrange. He had induced his sister and her husband to bring the children to New Orleans, to await the flood’s subsidence; and he had waited for their arrival before inviting the boys to dinner, in order that their welcome might be eager, and their enjoyment of his hospitality free from embarrassment.

In company with their flatboat guests, the lads felt completely at home, and perhaps their shrewdly kind host aided toward this result by having the dinner served in the most homelike and informal way that he could manage.

As the steamboat on which they were to “work their way” up the river was to sail the next afternoon, this evening at Mr. Kennedy’s was their last in New Orleans.

“And what a delightful finish it has been to all our experiences!” said Irv, when they all got back to their hotel.