456 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI,
call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of
a military man. We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then
news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of
the town, and were sweeping everything before them. Our column
moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my mtisket was very
heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached
the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was
behind my Mend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while
I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home,
I was not feeling any solicitude about Mm of course, because I knew
he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without
any trouble. If I had had any doubts about that, I would have
borrowed another musket for him. I lefb the city pretty early the
next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter
my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to
seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing
uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or
not. I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that.
And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the
circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations
than I was.
One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the * Globe-
Democrat * came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics,
whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the
morning and evening church services the day before, and 23,102
children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons, out of
the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day religious-
wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of
the Associated Press, and preserved them. They made it apparent
that St. Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have
claimed to be in my time. But now that I canvass the figures
narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be
that there are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other
250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000,
according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended church
and Sunday-school, while out of th* 150,000 Catholics, 116,188 wen*
to church, and Sunday-school.