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A network twenty feet high, of rods and girders, of beams, pillars, stairways, gearing, roofing, ceiling, walling; wrecks of looms, shafts, twisters, pulleys, bobbins, mules, locked and interwoven; wrecks of human creatures wedged in; a face that you know turned up at you from some pit which twenty-four hours' hewing could not open; a voice that you know crying after you from God knows where; a mass of long, fair hair visible here, a foot there, three fingers of a hand over there; the snow bright-red under foot; charred limbs and headless trunks tossed about; strong men carrying covered things by you, at sight of which other strong men have fainted; the little yellow jet that flared up, and died in smoke, and flared again, leaped out, licked the cotton-bales, tasted the oiled machinery, crunched the netted wood, danced on the heaped-up stone, threw its cruel arms high into the night, roared for joy at helpless firemen, and swallowed wreck, death, and life together out of your sight, the lurid thing stands alone in the gallery of tragedy.
Our host's cocktails, made of champagne bitters and pounded ice, soon put all things to rights; and after breakfast we lounged down to the quays on the river-side, which were piled mountains high with cotton-bales and tobacco tierces, and mixed in the lively and busy scene of discharging, selling, and shipping cargoes.
At once he raised a formidable barricade of mud and timber, and strengthened it with cotton-bales from the neighboring plantations. The cotton, however, proved rather a nuisance than a help, as it took fire under the attack, and smoked, annoying the men. The "fortifications of cotton-bales" were only a romance of the war.
It is a curious anomaly that Americans should burn cotton-bales in the Southern States to keep up the price, and that the American Red Cross on the other hand should in Europe distribute free garments to those who cannot pay the world-price thus attained. The exchange is very low, five crowns to a penny, three hundred to a dollar.
If the trader had not been sure, by a certain good-humored twinkle in the large eye, that all this banter was sure, in the long run, to turn out a cash concern, he might have been somewhat out of patience; as it was, he laid down a greasy pocket-book on the cotton-bales, and began anxiously studying over certain papers in it, the young man standing by, the while, looking down on him with an air of careless, easy drollery.
From this on they floated in company with ever-increasing masses of drift trees, fences, farming implements, straw-stacks, cotton-bales, out-buildings, and every now and then a house, lifted bodily from its foundations, and borne away in the resistless arms of the ever-swelling tide.
The watchman was sitting in a sort of arm-chair of ironbound cotton-bales; his long coat was tucked between his legs, his hat was over his nose, and he was fast asleep. I did not need any one to tell me that now was my time; but it was with limbs that almost refused their office from sheer fright, that I crept past the sleeping man, and reached the edge of the wharf.
Baptiste shook his head and moved sorrowfully away. "Hey, by howly St. Patrick, here's that little fruit-eater!" called the centre of another group of strikers perched on cotton-bales. "Hello! Where " began a second; but the leader suddenly held up his hand for silence, and the men listened eagerly.
Piled with cotton-bales, from many a plantation, up over deck and sides, till she seems in the distance a square, massive block of gray, she moves heavily onward to the nearing mart. We must look some time among its crowded decks before we shall find again our humble friend Tom. High on the upper deck, in a little nook among the everywhere predominant cotton-bales, at last we may find him.
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