CHAPTER XL.
CASTLES AND CULTURE.
BATON ROCGE was clothed in Hovers, like a bride—no, much more
so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now—
no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The
magnolia-trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with
their dense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms. The scent of
the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it, because it is so
powerful. They are not good bedroom blossoms—they might suffo-
cate one in. his sleep. "We were certainly in the South at last; for
here the sugar region begins, and the plantations—vast green levels,
with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle
distance—were in view. And there was a tropical sun overhead and
a tropical swelter in the air.
And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise : a wide river
hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and
no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.
Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building;
,for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have
been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations
ago, with his mediaeval romances. The South has not yet recovered
from, the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fan-
tastic heroes and their grotesque 'chivalry* doings and romantic
juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already
perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of
cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language
and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. It is patketic
enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things—materials
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