John William Clayton - The Sunny South

The Right of Translation is reserved.

Decorative Image

THE SUNNY SOUTH.

Decorative Image

I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK
TO
ISABEL AND HAROLD,
IN THE HOPE THAT THESE PASSAGES IN THE TRAVEL-LIFE OF
THEIR FATHER MAY BE SOME DAY NOT WITHOUT
INTEREST TO THEM.

Decorative Image

Decorative Image

Decorative Image

IT was almost at the last moment when, after having bid farewell to all our friends, we found ourselves on board the steamer that was to take us from England on an autumn tour to the sunny south. There was great noise and bustle on deck; the friends of the departing passengers had all left the ship, and in a few minutes the anchor was weighed.

It was yet early morning, and the sun was rising with great brilliance in the east; but his appearance was only momentary, for while we were rejoicing in the prospect of a beautiful sunlit day, he suddenly withdrew from our sight, and hid his glorious visage behind a thick cloud. So unexpected was his obscuration, that we could almost have fancied he had covered his face with a veil to conceal from his sight a scene of unexampled squalor and misery that lay heaped upon the fore-deck. A band of fifty followers of the unfortunate Maximilian of Mexico, who had landed in England a day or two before, were now being wafted by a friendly breeze, not the less welcome that it came so late, towards their homes, with simply nothing left to them but their lives.

Without other clothing than a few parti-coloured rags, which but a short time back had composed the gay panoply of war, clinging to their festering bodies, without that glory which, in the lack of every other reward, is often sufficient to compensate soldiers for having left the happy hearths of their homes and the loving eyes of their kindred, these sons of fair-haired Austria were slowly returning, feeble in body and broken down in spirit, to their fatherland, carrying with them the mortifying recollection of a shameful defeat at the hands of a distant, half-barbarous race whom they had despised, and with the destruction of health for life, the loss of limbs, and the blighting of hopes which they had once nourished. Such were the subjects, such the colours, which composed this little illustrative picture of the pomp and circumstance of glorious war. Those young soldiers, all of whom were either suffering from wounds or prostrated by sickness, were standing on the deck in haggard groups, chatting about their native place, about the home of their youth, or about the plans which they intended to carry out when they arrived there. A few were groaning with pain, some of them suffering so severely as to be almost insensible to what was passing around them. Others who were in a comparatively sound condition were laughing and dancing, forgetting with the light spirit of soldiers both what they themselves had endured, and the anguish of their suffering comrades. The garb of all was in the most miserable and tattered condition, showing how soon the gaudy uniform of the soldier is tarnished in the tug of actual war. Falstaff's wretched band of followers did not exhibit more diversity in the colour and fashion of their habiliments than did these followers of an imperial prince.