CRISS-CROSS JOURNEYS.*
Mn. TRORNBURVE4 Criss-Cross Journeys is an exception to the rule that short papers are seldom worthy of the honours of a reprint. The book, in addition to its pleasant style, has an interest almost archa3ological, for it records the experiences of an observant traveller in America on the outbreak of the great Civil War, which was waged so recently, but which seems like ancient history ; and it sketches a state of society that can never again arise in the New World. The chapters on Russia possess . interest of a similar kind, though inferior in degree ; they were written not very long before the abolition of serfdom.
Negro humour seems to have died out since the abolition of slavery, just as Irish humour has died out since "justice to
• Criss-Cross Journeys. By Walter Thornbury. London : Hurst and Blacken. Ireland." We wonder why. Is it because, though the blacks had no liberty, they had also no responsibility, and were free from the narking anxieties of life ? Fun and sentiment were inextricably mingled in the old " nigger " stories and melodies, in lives which were absolutely out of the individual's own hands, in which the division between work and play was sharp and decisive, in which men might be " traded off," but never had to think about food or clothing, rent, taxes, prices, or politics ; lives with ,possible beatings, but sure and certain banjos and dancing in them ; lives in which everything was " massa's " look-out, and it was his interest that they should be jolly. A dreadful state of things in most of its aspects was that dead-and-gone wickedness, but it bad just that one pleasant peculiarity,—it produced capital sayings and capital songs. But they are also dead and gone; Christy Minstrelism, in its old sense, is at an end, and the free and enlight- ened high falutin' of Burgess Minstrelism can never replace it. Your modern nigger in•broadcloth, and boots as black as his skin and as polished as his manners, with a political platform and a party, is a charming spectacle, but a dull dog, as dull as a modern Dublin attorney, or a Fenian, in the haunts of Paul Rooney and Dan O'Connell. So when Mr. Thornbury carries us back to Ole Virginny, and the society of Uncle Ned, Lucy Neal, Miss Dinah, and the old folks in general, we go very willingly. The first ex- cursion is to the nine-mile long Mammoth Cave in the mule-breed- ing State of Kentucky, which we used to associate in old times with "Horseshoe Robinson," and other individuals who described themselves as " half-horse, half-alligator," and whose mode of signifying approbation was by jumping into the air and crowing. The Mammoth Cave, like the Mariposa Groves, can never be described too often for our taste ; and after Mr. Bayard Taylor's, and in a totally different style, Mr. Thornbury's description is the beat of the scores which we have read with impartial eagerness. It is grim and funny, exact and suggestive, and we are delighted with Seneca, the irrepressible nigger guide, who knows all about it, but is not therefore surly and contemptuous, like the British showman, who generally seems to resent the curiosity and interest he has long outlived. Seneca is a charming incongruity, as he goes on anyhow, swinging his lantern, singing his absurdly out-of- place melodies about the "Boat-race," and how he wishes to know who's going " to bet on the grey," his own money being staked on " the bob-tailed mare "—dear matters of speculation which ad- dress us out of the cavern of the years—and laughing slyly at Mr. Thornbury's archaeological companion, who addresses him as " Yon rascal," because " St. Ives never cares to be civil to any- one poorer than himself." Seneca, who answers a question upon " formation " by muttering something about " lectrum telumgraff " and St. Ives being a " reg'lar driver," and then bursts into " Dandy Jim from Caroline," and goes on to drown remonstrance with,— " Oh! the crew they are darkies, the cargo is corn, And tho money comes tumbling in," makes one wish to buy a black,' and live where one could keep him. There is nothing like Seneca, except the black butler in Dr. Mayo's Never Again; but we should not now find him at the Mam- moth Cave, for as he sang in the " sick-room," before he told them all about it,—
"Nebraska's going to be a State, Few days, few days ; Cuba,.too, will come in late ; I'm gwine home."
Here is the story of. the " sick-room," far in among the two hundred and twenty-six avenues, the forty-seven domes, the eight cataracts, and the twenty-three pits :— " In one gloomy corner, far from the light of day, there are the rains of a row of stone cabins, where eight or ten consumptive persons, most of them wealthy, came and lived for several months many years ago. A Kentucky doctor, during a visit to this wonderful cave, formed an empirical opinion that a winter spent in the cave might retard, if not cure, consumption. Dying men, who linger coughing at death's door, are ready to do anything. Old age is not very common in America, where, after a hot and feverish burst of life, men wear out soon, and die young ; so purses were pulled out, and a stream of dollars set in towards the cave,—which belonged to the doctor. Building materials were soon dragged down into the darkness, and this great sepulchre rang with sounds of axes and hammers. Soon a row of stone huts—very small, but with room enough for a stool and bed, a table and a chest, in each— was raised. Down into these, on litters, on horseback, or crawling on foot, came these hectic creatures ; down, down into the darkness. Months passed, and the patients grew no better; one died in this dreary abode. Daily, at a certain hour, a negro servant visited them with food like a gaoler. How glad they must have been to have heard his cheery voice come chanting songs down the glimmering entrance, where the bats whine faintly when the light disturbs them in their winter sleep Imagine the long hours round those lurid stones in that great sarco- phagus, the nightmare dreams, the spectral-creeping sense of alarm and isolation, the slowly-fading hopes as the chances of recovery began to recede into the darkness; and at last, death there!" •
Seneca did not permit Mr. Tbornbury's party to meditate long upon this horrid theme ; he carried them off, to the tune of "Happy Land of Canaan," to the pits where the Americans dug for saltpetre during the War of Independence. Our cruisers so swept the New World coast, that vessels bringing gunpowder fax the " Rebels " could not land their cargoes. Washington was, therefore, driven to dig for the nitrous earth in this cave, just as the London Puritans during the Civil Wars, or the Parisians in the Great French Revolutions dug in their cellars for the same element of destruction.
Next to Seneca, we like the snakes. They, too, have died 'tub of American books of late, but here they are again, the dear old puff-adders and pine-snakes, in that infant Louvre, the Smith- sonian Institution at Washington ; the cotton-mouth snake of Carolina, the "barber's pole" of Jamaica. Here, too, are tales of the- travelling quacks who sell rattlesnakes' fat for curing sprains and bruises, after the immemorial fashion of the Indians ; and of the terror, anguish, and fury of the snakes when the prairie is on fire." Mr. Thornbury positively asserts the practice of, snake-worship. among the American negroes up to the date of his travels among them. Writing of New Orleans, he says :— " Here, stealing up the Mississippi at night, come the steam-slavers- to unload their cargo of blacks in some wooded creek, intending thence to pass them stealthily into the interior. To New Orleans, stowed away in one way or another, drift in perpetually negroes from Cabe. Here at the slave marts—boldly announced on signboards—you see all day moping men and women looking through the barred glass doors. This. is the city where poisons can be bought from mysterious old negro- women living near the Bayous ; and where jealous Creoles, quarrelling with their paramours, can purchase the power of killing them in a. week, two months, or a year, so subtle are these revengeful people in the art of poisoning. It IN as in this city of strange contrasts, while I was there, that some mischief was suspected by the police is brewing among the free negro population in the black quarter. The police, armed as usual with revolver and cutlass, at a certain hour of the night, closed upon a house particularly suspected. Seeing unusual light, and hearing many voices, they at once broke in, and found a. band of old negresses scantily clothed, and engaged in the idolatrous Voodoo ceremonies, dancing and chanting round a cauldron in which a-. rattlesnake was boiling. The ringleaders were at once arrested, and taken off to the caboose, and were condemned eventually to various durations of imprisonment." [This story has a parallel of much later- date, in Mr. Goodman's Pearl of the Antilles.]
"My Two Friends from Texas" is the title of a most amusing chapter. Amos and Ichabod Allen are fine, droll, chivalrous, fiery, generous fellows as ever fired into a buffalo on the plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, before buffaloes were over- crowded into retirement, or "drew a bead" on a Comanche- Indian. Their horror of the cabin passengers and of social? restraints in general, their enthusiasm for border-life, their per- petual singing of " The Texan Ranger," with its refrain, " 9n. the banks of the Rio Grande," their amazing repertory of ejacula- tion, and the odd dash of sentiment about them, make up a. picture which might hang beside some of Bret Mate's. "Blue Fewjins" is a neat exclamation, and to us novel, but it may perhaps be in common use " on this side ;" for did we not find a fine English lady in a superfine English novel the other day declaring of somebody that he was a person she felt disposed to " odiate " ? Mr. Thornbury attaches singular value to a curious song, the text of which he took down from Amos Allen's lips, and of which we will quote a few verses, for the sake of his theory about it. The song, which he supposes, we think correctly, to be not in print, is called " Napoleon at the Isle of St. Helena„"" and commences thus :—
" Bonaparte's returned from the wars of all fighting, He has gone to a place which he'll never take delight in ; He will sit there and tell of the scenes that he has seen, 0 t With his heart so full of woe on the Isle of Saint Helena.
" Louisa she mourns for her husband who's departed, She dreams when she sleeps, and she wakes broken-hearted ; Not a friend to console her, even though he might have seen her„ But she mourns when she thinks of the Isle of Saint Helena.
"No more in Saint Cloud shall we walk in splendour, Or go in clouds like the great Sir Alexander ; The young King of Rome and the Prince of Guiana, Says he'll bring his father home from the Isle of Saint Helena."'
Thus gravely does Mr. Thornbury discuss this production :—" This is a singular example of the gradual corruption of ballads whoa orally handed down ; and also a curious exemplification of the tone of feeling with which Napoleon, in his later days, must have been regarded by the French West Indians, to one of whom I think we may fairly attribute the authorship of this strange poem. I should mention that the tune to which it is sung is exceedingly good, and very tender and mournful in its cadence." " Bill Stumps, his. mark 1" The ballad is one which was sung in the little town of New Ross, County Wexford, fifty years ago, and the air is an Irish one, as old as King O'Toole. " He will sit there and tell of the scenes.
that he has seen, 0 !" like the ballad-singers who pervaded Irish streets and kitchens at the time ; the very unhistorical view of the conduct of " Louisa "—which is equally Irish, especially that
bull' in rhyme,—" even though he might have seen her," and the delightful confusion between Saiut Cloud, and going in clouds like "Sir" Alexander, which refers to a very old and violently- coloured print of Napoleon and Marie Louise in the characters of Dryden's " God-like hero" and " the lovely Thais by his side," are all internal evidence of the origin of the poem, which, however, the present writer, like Theodore Hook's friend, " happens to know "for a fact.
Scenes in the Cotton-country, the story of Colonel Bowie, and a number of chapters on certain aspects of American life, politics, and commerce which have quite ceased to exist are very amusing. When the scene changes to the Nile, the book ie not so funny ; but it contains some really fine picturesque writ- ing, and an unusually amusing dragoman. Of course, like all books of Nile travel, a great deal of it is occupied with the drago- man ; as that is invariable, we conclude it is inevitable. In the Russian portion, there is a chapter called "Starting for Siberia," which we wish we had not read, but which is only too well worth reading.
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