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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
great, hearty, wholesome, humanity that knows more of the sweet side of life than the bitter, as little of want as Marie Antoinette knew of the price of bread, and lives like a king with a sugar cane for a scepter, a cotton boll for a royal standard, who tickle the soil with a plow and it laughs into a golden harvest for them.
About the lonely waters of the Gulf of Mexico sand lands dribble off through rushes to the sea. These island lands are the homes of gulls, terns, and those beautiful white-plumaged pelicans we call the white aigrettes, and which are hunted for that single dainty feather that floats like a thistle down on many a lady’s best bonnet. It takes sixteen thousand aigrettes to make a pound, and a pound fetches seven hundred dollars. The deer hide in the salty sedges, and through the soilless wastes the bayous trickle like sprawling watery fingers, reaching out from the land to clutch the sea.
On these low coasts and islands are orange groves and cauliflower farms, and here the fisher folk dwell, their only vehicle a little, red latteen-sailed lugger, their only law the good priest whose teachings keep them from evil just as the gulf waters keep them “far from the madding crowd.” Westward the coast gets firmer, and the live oak trees lean with the bend of the wind. The orange trees are taller. In Cameron Parish, not twenty miles from the gulf, there is a grand old tree that many times has borne in one crop ten thousand oranges. I have seen it so, and it is a sight to put all the golden apples of Hesperides to the blush.
Beyond the lowlands of the coast we come into a stretch of magnificent prairie, boundless and golden as Nebraska, that unfurls like a scroll waiting to be written on in all the paying hieroglyphics of the plow' and harrow.
Almost all the northern and western people who have come into the state have settled on this western prairie or in the priceless pine forests that clasp it like a girdle. It is a great rice country. Every fruit known to the Middle and Southern states flourishes here and vegetables grow to an almost unequaled perfection. From ten to twenty dollars an acre is the selling price of these lands. Cattle on these prairies do not need to be housed at all during the year, and require not more than six weeks’ feeding, even for milk cows.
To the East, the rolling lands begin to take on hardwood trees; the streams that we call “bayous” braid in and out like silver threads through a sober fabric; the ombs of red-tiled roofs and the admonishing crosses of the village churches paint their serene pictures on the bending sky. The fallow fields swell as if breathing, and here we are in the heart of the “Attakapas country,” the land of “Evangeline” and the home of the Arcadians.
It is all as pastoral as England. The green banks of the Teche slope like gardens along the Thames; the light mosses on the oaks float the gray crape of their veils so that their most delicate tendrils are etched against the air; die Creole cattle stand knee-deep in the clover or in the bayou shallows cropping lily pods. Beyond the banks you catch the broad green flicker of the cane ribbons. The contented negro croons - over his hoe; a plantation bell rings off the workmen for the noonday rest; a wagon creaks by, frothing over with fresh cotton; a mocking-bird sings on a Cherokee hedge; a pelican rests on the queer pontoon bridge that clasps shore to shore. This is Louisiana.
In the northern parishes, where cotton is an ungrateful king, are steep hills, a great untouched marble quarry bursting its bondage to earth, and the long country roads are lined with walnut and persimmon trees and are thick-set with hazel bushes. Here in the orchards apples, peaches, pears and plums pelt their fruits down into the tangled grasses.
In very truth only a minor portion of the state is composed of swamp land or salt water marsh; only a small portion is in danger of overflow; and in the best alluvial districts the black soil will be thirty feet deep. There are farms in Louisiana that have been in cultivation for fifty years, have never had a pound of fertilizer used on them, and yet show no signs of giving out. These lands are sold at from twenty to fifty dollars an acre, according to the improvements.