University of Virginia Library

14. CHAPTER XIV.
GLIMPSES ALONG SHORE OF THE OLD NORTH STATE.

If you have ever, in a past period of your life, been a coastwise
voyager, south or north, along our Atlantic shores, and making
your way, after an antique fashion, in one of those good old slow-and-easy
coaches, called packet ships, brigs, or schooners, you
must a thousand times have bewailed the eternal prospect, the
endless length of waste and unprofitable shore, which the old
North State continued to unfold to your weary eyes, creeping
forward at a snail's pace under the influence of contrary winds,
or no winds at all, with every now and then the necessity of
going about, lest the nose of your vessel — having thereto a strong
native tendency — should thrust itself into one of Peleg Perkin's
tar barrels, close by Pamlico, or, worse still, into the ugly Scylla
and Charybdis, the ship-traps of Cape Hatteras. From rise of
morn to set of sun, still the same vague, faint, monotonous outline.
You go to your berth at night, with a half-smothered curse at
the enormous bulk of body which the good old state protrudes
along your path. You rise in the morning and ask, with the smallest
possible expectation, of the steward —

“Where are we now?” and still the same lamentable answer
“Off North Carolina, sir.”

You go on deck, and there, precisely as she lay last night, she
lies this morning — a sluggish monster drowsing on the deep, like
that to the back of which Sinbad had recourse, dreaming it a
comfortable islet for hermit habitation.

The annoyance was immeasurable, and, doubtless, to this feeling
may be ascribed much of that sharp sarcasm to which, in its season,
the good old North State has been exposed; she nevertheless,
all the while, showing herself very scornfully indifferent to
that vulgar thing, called, very ridiculously, “public opinion.”
Angry travellers were apt to assume an intellectual sluggishness
on the part of her people corresponding to that which her vast
outline along the sea seemed to indicate to the voyager. That
she made no great fuss in the body politic — that she kept herself
out of hot water of all kinds, and, in proportion to the exhibition
of morbid energies on the part of her neighbors, seemed
all the more resolute to subdue her own — these were assumed
as proofs of a settled mental atrophy, which only made her
enormous bulk of body show more offensively in the eyes of the
impatient traveller. He visited upon her genius the very vastness
of her dimensions, and fancied that her soul was small, simply
because her physique was gigantic.

“And, by the way,” answered my Gothamite, “a very reasonable
assumption according to human experience.”

“True enough,” interposed our orator with a leer, “as instanced
in your own state of Gotham.”

Duyckman felt uneasy and looked savage for a moment. The
Alabamian continued.

“What was felt of tedious, passing the shores of the old North
State, was not a whit lessened when you took the land route,
seeking to shorten the progress by the help of railroads and
locomotives. A more dreary region than the track from Wilmington
to Portsmouth is hardly to be found anywhere. The
region through South Carolina, from Augusta to Charleston, is
bad enough. That through her ancient sister is a fraction
worse.”

“Something is due to our own impatience. Our thoughts do
not keep progress with our eyes. Were travellers observers,
which they rarely are, and still less thinkers upon what they observe,
they would make many more grateful discoveries along
the route than they do. He who goes from Dan to Beersheba
and reports nothing to be seen, is simply an animal that has not
duly acquired the use of his eyes.”

“My friend,” quoth the Alabamian with green eyes — “your
eyes have been indulgent. I have tried as much as possible to
see something along your Carolina routes, but to little profit.”

“Perhaps,” put in a sharp, peppery, little fellow, whom we
afterward ascertained to be from the old North State himself—

“perhaps, you did all your seeing through those tea-green spectacles.”

“I surely have done so always when passing through North
Carolina,” answered the other quietly. “It was needful to give
the trees, shrubs, fields and flowers, something of a natural complexion.
Now, I will report briefly the result of several progresses,
through that state, during the growing season. The
whole country, so far as its agriculture is concerned, seemed
wretchedly unpromising. The glimpse here and there of a tolerable
farm, was only an oasis in the desert, which made the rest
of the country more and more distressing to the eye. The cornfields
were few, I could have covered half of them with a table
cloth, and the crops raised seem all destined for the markets of
Laputa.”

“Laputa? Where's that, I wonder?” quoth North Carolina.

“Somewhere north of Brobdignag, I believe, and west of the
tropics, between the equator and the Frozen sea, and crossed
by the central fires of the Equinox, which enables the people
to raise potatoes and barley with equal facility, but prevents
them from growing corn. This commodity, of which they are
passionately fond, eating an ear at a mouthful, and chewing the
cob at their leisure, is brought to them only once a year by one
Captain Gulliver, a native of Cape Cod, the only known trader
between Laputa and North Carolina. I should not be surprised
if he is even now taking in a cargo at Wilmington.”

“I never heard of the man, and I reckon I know all the people
that trade to Wilmington, captains and ships. Just say now,
if you can remember, what's the vessel called that he navigates.”

“The Long Bow,” was the quiet and immediate answer. “This
is a great craft for shallow waters. She certainly does trade
with North Carolina somewhere — are you sure that you remember
all the names of the vessels that ply to your ports.”

“Every one of them?”

“You have a most wonderful memory, my friend. — But passing
from the cornfields of your state, I am sorry to say that I
can say as little for its habitations. The dwellings were all of
the rudest construction, and signs of gardening, or culture of any
kind, were as rare, almost, as you will find them along the waste
places of the Tigris and the Dead sea. As for fruit, the peaches,

and apples offered us along the route were such as nature seemed
to have designed for the better encouragement of Cholera,—a
sort of bounty offered for bile, indigestion, dyspepsia and riled
intestines.”

“But that's only along the railroad route,” said our little
North Carolina man, “and who ever expects to see a decent
country along a railroad route in any agricultural region?”

Another party came to the succor of the North-Carolinian
with whom our bilious orator was evidently disposed to amuse
himself.

“He is right. You will form a very erroneous notion of this
truly valuable state if you assume its general character from
what you see along the railroad route. North Carolina is even
now, in many respects, one of the most prosperous of all the
states. She lacks nothing but population to exhibit incomparable
resources, of vegetable and mineral treasure, such as in future
days shall make us utterly forgetful of California. Penetrate
the interior even now, and you will be rewarded in a thousand
places by the beauties of a careful cultivation, the sweets of a
mild and graceful society, and the comforts of a condition to
which want and care are strangers, and where the real misfortune
is that the means of life are so easily and abundantly found.
North Carolina has suffered a greater drain upon her population,
in emigration to the Southwest, than probably any of her Atlantic
sisters. How often have I met, twenty years ago, her
poor wayfarers — `from Tar River, or thar' abouts,' trudging
on by the side of their little wagons, from which the great eyes
of a wilderness of young ones were peeping out, thick as the
dogwood blossoms in the spring-time. The surplus population—
the natural increase of this state, and that of South Carolina
and Virginia — have thus for thirty years or more been carried
off to the unrestoring West; and it is only within the last seven
that the torrent seems to be measurably stayed. The prosperity
of these states depends in great degree upon the arrest
of this outflow; — since all the improvements ever effected in a
state — all of its newer developments of resource — are only to
be made by its own surplus, or natural increase, under the stimulus
of necessities, the result of a more crowded condition, and a
closer competition in the fields of labor. That portion of a population

which has reached the age of forty seldom achieve any
new development of the resources of a country. To hold their
own — to be what they have been and keep as they are, — is
all that can reasonably be expected at their hands. But they
are doing much more than this. As a state, and as communities,
they are making large general improvements, and as individuals,
they are rising equally in education and in prosperity.”

“Glad to hear it, but take leave to doubt,” responded the
man of bile. “You are evidently an enthusiast, my friend; a
word in your ear —”

Here he slid up to the previous speaker, looked him slyly under
his green spectacles, gave him a nudge in his side, and
whispered: —

“Don't I know Rip Van Winkle as well as you or anybody
else, but don't you see that this little fellow don't know me. We'll
have some fun out of him. He has a large capital of patriotism
out of which we shall manufacture many a broad grin, such as
would do no discredit to a Washington politician. Listen now,
while I touch him under his diaphragm. — It's something of a
waste of words,” he resumed aloud, “to be discussing North
Carolina. But — one question. Have you ever been to Smithville?
If you want to know something of her, go to Smithville.
We once put into that port, somewhat in distress, making the
voyage from Charleston to New York in one of those cockle
shells which Pennoyer got up to run between the two places.
She was the Davy Brown I think. She had very nearly carried
me to Davy Jones'. It is a God's mercy that these miserable
little mantraps had not gulfed their hundreds as did the
`Home.' Well, we put into Smithville — a gale blowing on
deck, and fifty children squalling in the cabin. A few of us got
to shore, counting on an oyster supper. We met a fellow seven
feet high, with his back against a bank of sand that kept off the
wind, while the fragment of an old cutter's deck, hanging over
the bank, covered him from the rain — all except drippings and
leakage.— There was the bottom of an old turpentine tub beside
him from which he detached occasional fragments of gum to
gnaw upon. We questioned him about oysters.

“`Reckon it's hard to find 'em now.'

“`Why?'

“`Why, you see, we've done cleaned off all a 'top, and them
down low in the water's mighty hard to come at. Don't get
much oysters at Smithville now. Reckon there mought have
been a right smart chance of 'em long time ago — 'bout the
Revolution.'

“`Well, do you think we can get any broiled chickens anywhere?'

“`Chickens don't do so well at Smithville. I'm thinking they
drink too much of the salt water, and the gravel's too coarse for
'em, but they die off mighty soon, and there's no cure for it.'

“`Eggs?'

“`Well now, as for eggs, somehow the hens don't lay as they
used to. Folks say that there's a sort of happidemic among the
poultry of all kinds. They don't thrive no more in Smithville.'

“`And what have you got in Smithville?'

“`I reckon there's pretty much all the Smiths here that was
here at the beginning. Old granny Pressman Smith lives thar
in that rether old house that looks a'most as if it was guine to
fall. 'Lijah Smith keeps opposite. He had the grocery, but
he's pretty much sold out — though they do say there's a
schooner expected mighty soon with some codfish and p'taters
for him, from down East. Rice Smith owns that 'ere flat, you
sees thar' with its side stove; and the old windmill yander with
the fans gone b'longs to Jackson W. Smith, the lawyer. He's
pretty much broke up I hear, by buying a gold mine somewhere
in the South. I'm a Smith myself — my name's Fergus Smith,
but I'm the poorest of the family. I don't own nothing, no
how, and never did.'

“Now there's a chronicle,” said our orator. “Was there ever
such a complete picture of all sorts of debris and ruin?”

“But Smithville is not North Carolina,” was the reply of our
little red-faced native, who seemed particularly to resent this
portraiture.

“I am afraid it is,” was the reply of the orator, coolly spoken,
and without seeming to heed the evident ruffling of the young
one's plumage. “I have seen somewhere,” he continued, “a
picture of the old North State, of which I remember just the
heads. Doubtless there is some exaggeration in it, but on the
whole the thing is true. It is true in generals if not details —

true to the spirit of the whole, if regardless of all occasional exceptions.
We have had a picture of the Virginian. We can
not object to one of the North-Carolinian, and he who objects to
it as not true, will be wise enough to regard it as a jest, not
wholly without body in the fact.”

“Oh, you're only a-jesting, then?”

“Jesting, sir! I never jest. I am as serious as the Dutch
Momus, and I never suffer myself to smile except in a thunder-storm.”

“And what makes you smile then?”

“To hear so much ado about nothing.”

“You're a mighty strange person, I'm a thinking.”

“Ah! that's a practice, my young friend, you should not indulge
in. Don't go out of your way, at any time, in search
after vain things.”

“You don't call thinking a vain thing?”

“By no means — only you search after it.”

“I don't rightly understand you.”

“The fault, I suspect, is rather yours than mine; and I don't
see how we're to amend it. I must leave you to your unassisted
efforts; and, if you will suffer me, I will resume my portrait of
the old North State.”

“That's right! Go ahead, old Bile!” cried the Texan, irreverently.
The Alabamian glanced at him from under his green
spectacles.

“Have you been eating cabbage, my friend?”

“Cabbage, no!”

“It must be the cocktails then! Either swear off from cocktails
altogether, Texas, or go and get yourself another. Your
complexion is rather the worse for wear.”

“Oh! d—n the complexion,” cried Texas, “and breeze away
with what you've got. Hurrah for nothing — go ahead!”

“Thank you for permission,” was the cool reply. “And now,
gentlemen, for our unknown chronicler of the virtues of the old
North State. I may not give his exact language always, but
you will excuse my involuntary fault: —

“`The genius of North Carolina,' says he, `is clearly masculine.
He has no feminine refinements. You will not accuse
him of unnecessary or enfeebling delicacies, and, one merit, he

is totally free from affectation. You have strong smells of him
before you approach his shores, but these occasion no concern
in—'”

Here, however, a bell rang, which seemed to have some peculiar
meaning in it. The Texan curled himself up only to stretch
away for the cabin. His example was about to be followed by
the rest, and our orator seeing this, judiciously proposed that we
should for the present forbear the discussion of the old North
State for the more grateful discussion of the supper — a proposition
which was carried nem. con. We adjourned to meet again.