nd the rhymes!

LXXV.

A YEAR'S VICISSITUDES

It was during the year spent by John March in Europe that Suez first
began to be so widely famous. It was then, too, that the Suez _Courier_
emerged into universal notice. The average newspaper reader, from Maine
to Oregon, spoke familiarly of Colonel Ravenel as the writer of its
much-quoted leaders; a fact which gave no little disgust to Garnet,
their author.

Ravenel never let his paper theorize on the causes of Suez's renown or
the _Courier's_ vogue.

"It's the luck of the times," he said, and pleasantly smiled to see the
nation's eyes turned on Dixie and her near sisters, hardly in faith, yet
with a certain highly commercial hope and charity. The lighting of every
new coke furnace, the setting fire to any local rubbish-heap of dead
traditions, seemed just then to Northern longings the blush of a new
economic and political dawn over the whole South.

"You say you're going South? Well, now if you want to see a very small
but most encouraging example of the changes going on down there, just
stop over a day in Suez!" Such remarks were common--in the clubs--in the
cars.

"Now, for instance, Suez! I know something of Suez myself." So said a
certain railway passenger one day when this fame had entered its second
year and the more knowing journals had begun to neglect it. "I was an
officer in the Union army and was left down there on duty after the
surrender a short while; then I went out West and fought Indians. But
Suez--I pledge you my word I wouldn't 'a' given a horseshoe-nail for the
whole layout! Now!--well, you'd e'en a'most think you was in a Western
town! The way they're a slappin' money, b' Jinks, into improvements and
enterprises--quarries, roads, bridges, schools, mills--'twould make a
Western town's head swim!"

"What kind of mills?" asked his listener, a young man, but careworn.

"O, eh, saw-mills--tanbark mills--to start with. Was you ever there?"

"Yes, I--before the changes you speak of I----"

"Before! Hoh! then you've never seen Lover's Leap coal mine, or Bridal
Veil coal mine, or Sleeping Giant iron mine, or Devil's Garden coke
furnaces! They're putting up smelting works right opposite the steamboat
landing! You say you're going South--just stop over a day in Suez. It'll
pay you! You could write it up!--call it 'What a man just back f'm
Europe saw in Dixie'--only, you don't want to wave the Bloody Shirt, and
don't forget we're dead tired