284 LIFE ON MISSISSIPPI.
once renowned and vigorously hated Mrs. Irollope, Memphis seems
to have consisted mainly of one long street of log-houses, with some
outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward toward the woods; and
now and then a pig, and no end of mud. That was fifty-five years
ago. She stopped at the hotel. Plainly it was not the one which
gave us our breakfast. She says—
* The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly Ml. They ate in
perfect silence,and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over
literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were those produced
by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of coughing, etc*
(Coughing, etc.* The * etc.* stands for an unpleasant word there,
a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes
prints. You will find it in the following description of a steamboat
dinner which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters;
wealthy, well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual
harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams
and windy pretence—
* The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious
rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange un-
couth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the con-
tamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the
frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to
enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the
teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not
unrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and
that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment/