We happen to be the only occupants of the car, and our driver, glancing back at us through the sliding door, and realising that we are strangers in the land, divides his attention between his horses and his passengers. He has a pale, fair, melancholy face and dreamy eyes--a kind of blond Henry Irving--and we cannot get rid of an idea that Hamlet the Dane has followed his lamented father’s custom of “revisiting the glimpses of the moon,” and is doing us the honour of driving our car.
Presently we come upon a procession that attracts our interest. A party of people, chiefly of the gentler sex--I cannot in this case say the fairer, as they are all black as coals--are slowly parading the sidewalk, the girls, even down to little children three or four years old, all clad in white. It has been raining and the streets are still wet; they are tramping over muddy crossings in white satin slippers, their white dresses draggling in the damp, while their brown or black faces and black shining eyes beam with a kind of grotesque incongruity through their white veils.
“A bridal party?” we remark interrogatively to our Hamlet. The Prince of Denmark shakes his head, and vouchsafes a grave and dreamy smile as he corrects our mistake: “No, ma’am. It’s a coloured funeral.”
Turning into Claiborne Street we fancy it must be the entrance-gate to the forest primeval; as far as the eye can reach we gaze through long vistas of ancient trees, whose huge trunks are gnarled and knotted and scarred by the passing ages. This delightful avenue has four rows of these glorious trees, with double car-tracks running under their cool and welcome shade; down the centre, and crossed by rude rustic bridges, runs what we supposed to be a narrow canal or natural running stream, but we learn that it is an open sewer, the peculiar soil and sanitary arrangements of the city necessitating a system of open drainage--which is, however, by no means unsightly or offensive; and through the arteries of the city there run these narrow sewers, carrying all the impurities and refuse as a kind of tributary offering to the glorious Mississippi.
The burial grounds or cemeteries we pass on our way have a strange appearance, as in consequence of the peculiarities of the soil and climate, the dead are not buried under the earth, but are laid upon its surface with the stone monument raised above them.