CHAPTER  XVI.
RACING  DAYS.
it -was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between
four and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward
they would be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation),
and so one had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three
miles long, of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke ; a colon-
nade which supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together
and spreading abroad over the city. Every outward-bound boat had
its nag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the
verge staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were commanding
and swearing with more than usual emphasis; countless processions
of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and
flying aboard the stage-planks; belated passengers were dodging and
skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle
companion way alive, but having their doubts about it; women with
reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands
freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure
of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and gene? al distrac-
tion ; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a
wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together,
and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity,
except vaguely and dimly; every windlass connected with every fore-
hatch, from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other,
was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the
hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring laegroes that worked
them were roaring such songs as ^(De Las' Sack 1 De Las' Sack J *—
inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and