All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place. It is one of the most conveniently accessible of those “points of interest” with which guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern themselves. What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had ever been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallahassee, at all events, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; but I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion that the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so, vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he “interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor ”—a model immigrant, surely, ? 194 ? though it is rather the way of immigrants, perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.
Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of “the big house ”—a story-and-a-half cottage—amid the flowering shrubs. Here lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and—worthy son of a worthy sire—alderman and then mayor of the city of Tallahassee. Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades of Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature of the reluctant sex.
The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas! when I spoke of my morning’s pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, he told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in Tallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor. The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband’s death, and lived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informant sneered,—politely,—and brought me a ? 195 ? still older Tallahassean, Judge, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that indisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once, the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.
The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Prince had never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts (and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the worthier person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there, if my sentiment had been all wasted (but there was no question of tears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way thither a pleasant one—first down the hill in a zig-zag course to the vicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road through the valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther side. Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that road to-day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of frost.
In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite ? 196 ? the car-wheel foundry, and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was cutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and the chips flew; but I could not help saying, “You ought to make the man do that.”
She answered on the instant. “I would,” she said, “if I had a man to make.”
“I’m sure you would,” I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.
Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man of her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable n?iveté the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had died a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow under his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant to do so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not good for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he went farther, and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was no occasion for haste.
When I had skirted a cotton-field—the ? 197 ? crop just out of the ground—and a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I met a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.
“Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?” I inquired.
He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat servants, as his father had been before him. “I was borned on to him,” he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was “a gentleman, sah.” That was a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough. He spoke from a slave’s point of view. Murat was a good master. The old man had heard him say that he kept servants “for the like of the thing.” He didn’t abuse them. He “never was for barbarizing a poor colored person at all.” Whipping? Oh, yes. “He didn’t miss your fault. No, sah, he didn’t miss your fault.” But his servants never were “ironed.” He “didn’t believe in barbarousment.”
The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had not made ? 198 ? everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes (“my people” was his word) were on the wrong road. They had “sold their birthright,” though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. “They ain’t got no sense,” he declared, “and what sense they has got don’t do 'em no good.”
I told him finally that I was from the North. “Oh, I knows it,” he exclaimed, “I knows it;&rdquo............