504 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
' When Dean came/ said Claggett, * the people thought he was an
escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped
archangel.'
Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city •
and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing
city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy
factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober
city, too—for the moment—for a most sobering bill was pending; a
bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase,
sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession,
by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State
of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human
race, except water. This measure was approved by all the rational
people in the State ; but not by the bench of Judges.
Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of
devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire
department, a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without,
but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system.
In Burlington, as in all these Upper-Hiver towns, one breathes a
go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera
house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the
shabby dens which usually do duty as theatres in cities of Burlington's
size.
"We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight
view of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago, but
the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has
clear outgrown the town which I used to know. In fact, I know it
has; for I remember it as a small place—which it. isn't now. But I
remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one
Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to
tsarve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son
of the Devil I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he
was the only member of the family I had met; but that did not
satisfy Mm; lie wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he
was the* sole and only son of the Devil—and he whetted his knife on
Ids "boot* It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little
like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and