Society as I Have Found It. Ward McAllister
character there, giving the finest dinners, and being an authority on wine, i.e. Madeira, “Her Majesty’s Consul will have the honor.” I secretly smiled, as I knew they were coming to me, and I expected them the next day. This same good old Consul had ignored me, hearing I had had the audacity to give at my table filet de bœuf aux truffes et champignons. I returned home feeling sure that these young noblemen would be but a few hours under my roof before Her Majesty’s Consul would give me the honor of a visit. In fact, my guests had not been with me an hour when my old friend, the Consul, rushed up my front steps. Meeting me at the door he threw his arms around my neck, exclaiming, “My dear boy, I was in love with your mother thirty years ago; you are her image; carry me to your noble guests.” Ever after I had the respect and esteem of this dear old man, who, for Savannah, was rich as Crœsus, and before all things esteemed and valued a good dinner and a fine glass of Madeira. My filets de bœuf, and the scions of noble English houses placed me in the front social rank in that little, aristocratic town, and brought forth from one of its oldest inhabitants the exclamation, “My dear boy, your aunts, the Telfairs, could give breakfasts, but you, you can give dinners.”
Knowing the Englishmen’s habits, I gave to each one of them, on their arrival, enormous cedar wash-tubs and hot sheets for their morning ablutions; then a good breakfast, after which we drove to the river and had my brother-in-law’s ten-oared boat, called “The Rice Bird,” all the oarsmen in yachting rig, myself at the tiller, and the darkeys, knowing they would all have tobacco, or money, pulled for dear life from the start to the finish, giving us their plantation songs. The leader improvised his song, the others only singing in chorus. On these occasions, the colored people would give you in song all the annoyances they were subjected to, and the current events of plantation life, bringing in much of and about their “Massa” and his family, as follows: “Massa Ward marry our little Miss Sara, bring big buckra to Savannah, gwine to be good times, my boys, pull boys, pull, over Jordan!” Reaching the plantations, of which there were three, Fairlawn, Argyle, and Shaftesbury, well equipped with admirable dogs (for my brother-in-law was a great sportsman), we would shoot snipe over the rice lands until 2 P.M., then lunch elaborately in his plantation house, and row back in the cool of the afternoon, dining at 8 o’clock, and having as my guests every pretty girl within a hundred miles and more of the city. The flowers, particularly the rose called the Cloth of Gold, and the black rose, I was most prodigal with. I had given a fee to the clerk of the market to scour the country for game and delicacies, so our dinners were excellent, and the old Southern habit of sitting over Madeira until the small hours was adopted, and was, with the bright minds I had brought together, most enjoyable.
MERRYMAKING IN THE SOUTH.
CHAPTER VIII.
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