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“Well, marm,” --he was a full-toned Yankee--“why didn't you clean up your back yard?”
“My back yard is as I choose to have it, and it won't be altered at the order of any Yankee.”
“Well, marm,” falling now fully into the Yankee drawl, “I'm sorry, but you must go and get your calash and fix up a little, and I guess you had better take a shirt with you, for I shall be obleeged to take you to jail, and that would be an awful thing, wouldn't it, to do to such a fine lady as you are?”
“I shall not do anything of the sort,” said she.
“Oh, well, marm, I am very sorry, but I am very busy, too,” taking out his watch.
“I have just got three minutes I can wait upon you to get your calash and shirt, and if you don't do it by then, why I must take you along without them.”
She burst into tears and said: “You know I cannot do this work now.”
“Oh, well, if a fine lady like you should give me her promise that her yard would be cleaned by to-morrow afternoon I could take her word for it.”
The next afternoon the back yard was in apple-pie order.
Thus having got protection from filth in the future, the next requisition was to get rid of the filth that had accumulated.
A party of men went down to the French market with an order, accompanied by a few bayonets, which did not do any work.
The man who appeared to be in charge was told that the market must be cleaned out at once.
The superintendent said that he could not do it. “Very well, then, we shall do it and charge the expense to you.”
That market had been built by the Spanish, and a pavement had been laid in it. At the time we entered New Orleans, so I was informed, the actual decaying animal matter trodden into the bottom of that market extended up on the supports of the stalls fourteen, eighteen, and twenty-four inches above the pavement.
While this cleaning was being done we were waiting a “norther.”
The city water-works had been ordered to put their whole pumping force on the streets and flush them as well as they could with water, one after the other, and aided by a body of two thousand men to clean out all the drains and ditches, to get a flow of water down these ditches into the canals and bayous.
And then a “norther” came,
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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