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So the new arrivals sat rather silently under the shed of the levee on a row of cotton-bales, while Clay and MacWilliams raced off after the carriages. "I wish we didn't have to keep the hood down," young Langham said, anxiously, as they at last proceeded heavily up the muddy streets; "it makes it so hot, and you can't see anything.
With shipping ever on their left and cotton-yards and warehouses for tobacco and for salt on their right their horses' feet clinked leisurely over the cobble pavements, between thousands of cotton-bales headed upon the unsheltered wharves and only fewer thousands on the narrow sidewalks.
Jim Pink Staggs, a dapper gentleman of ebony blackness, of pin-stripe flannels and blue serge coat altogether a gentleman of many parts sat on one of the bales and indolently watched an old black crone fishing from a ledge of rocks just a little way below the wharf-boat. Around Jim Pink lounged and sprawled black men and youths, stretching on the cotton-bales like cats in the sunshine.
In the first place, the hold was stored by expert stevedores, the cotton-bales being so closely packed that a mouse could hardly find room to hide itself among them.
It is unparalleled in the history of warfare. The feats performed by the unwieldy iron-clads in the narrow bayous gained for them, from Lincoln, the title of "web-footed" gunboats. They had traversed shallow and tortuous channels; they had cleared their path of trees, snags, and even bridges; they had run the gantlet of flaming cotton-bales and Confederate bullets.
Then there were the tow-boats, pushing dozens of sooty coal-barges from the Ohio; freight-boats so piled with cotton-bales that only their pilot-houses and chimneys were visible; trading-scows and "Jo-boats;" floating dance-houses and theatres; ferryboats driven by steam, or propelled by mule-power, like the Whatnot; some large enough to carry a whole train of cars from shore to shore, and others with a capacity of but a single team.
It was answered by a shout of defiance from the men behind the cotton-bales; but the pilot, who stood just in front of Frank, staggered for a moment, and sank heavily to the deck. Frank was horrified.
After shrewdly filling his coffers with profits from Northern business-transactions, he now turns about, kicks his old friends, who always half suspected his knavish propensities, bows, cap in hand, to visionary cotton-bales, and hopes to turn some honest pounds, shillings, and pence by advocating the slave-drivers' rebellion.
It was perhaps a month after this that a pale, sickly-looking man, with a pair of saddle-bags over his arm, went ashore from the steamboat Arrow of Light, just landed at New Orleans, and made his slow way along the wharf, crowded with barrels, boxes, and cotton-bales, and thence to the open streets.
At one time, it is Fort Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating batteries mounted on rafts behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at another, it is Mr. Barrett, Mayor of Washington, announcing his intention that the President-elect shall be inaugurated, or Mr. Buchanan declaring that he shall cheerfully assent to it. Indeed! and who gave them any choice in the matter?
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