I began to feel depressed, overcome by a foreboding of wonder.
After dinner we separated. Clayton had errands to do preparatory to
leaving and I went forth to see the town. What a spectacle of undulating
board sidewalks built over swales of sand, running from hillock to
hillock! What shacks used for stores, trading offices, marts for real
estate! Truly it was a place as if built in a night, relieved but little
by buildings of a more substantial sort.... Drinking saloons were
everywhere. I heard music and entered one of these resorts. There was a
barroom in front and a dancing room in the rear. The place was filled
with sailors, steamboat captains and pilots, traders, roisterers,
clerks, hackmen, and undescribed characters. Women mingled with the men
and drank with them. They dressed with conspicuous abandon, in loud
colors. Their faces were rouged. They ran in and out of the dance room
with escorts or without, stood at the bar for drinks, entwined their
arms with those of the men. In the dance room a band was playing. A man
with a tambourine added to the hilarity of the music. It was a wild
spectacle, unlike anything I had ever seen. No one accosted me. I could
feel a different spirit in the crowd from that I had seen on the boats
or in New York. There was no talk of politics, negroes, force bills.
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