Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [146]
It came out in conversation that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner.
Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called The Gilded Age. There is a character in it called “Sellers.” I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named “Eschol Sellers.” Of course I said I could not, without stimulants. He said that away out West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name—“Eschol Sellers.” He added—
“It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn’t, he will never see the book anyhow. We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name—it is a rock.”
So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic-looking white men that ever lived called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever—well, in brief we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million 23 copies of the book and change that name to “Mulberry Sellers” in future editions.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Sugar and Postage
One day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most wished to see—Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me—or rather, over me—now captain of the great steamer City of Baton Rouge, the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line. The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe. There were some crow’s feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous.
His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth’s sugar plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ramshackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life.
Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans—Jackson’s victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood