She was due Tuesdays, but generally didn't get in until Wednesdays, and old Captain Rawlings would be the first to see her smoke coiling in a hazy smudge over Livingston Point and say the Belle was coming. Captain Rawlings had an uncanny knack of knowing all the boats by their smokes. The news would spread, and by the time she passed the Lower Towhead and was quartering across and running down past town, so she could turn and land upstream, there would be a lot of pleasurable excitement on the wharf. The black draymen standing erect on their two-wheeled craft, like Roman chariot racers, would whirl their mules down the levee at a perilous gallop, scattering the gravel every which way, and our leisure class--boys and darkies--and a good many of the business men, would come down to the foot of Main Street to see her land and watch the rousters swarm off ahead of the bellowing mates and eat up the freight piles. One trip she even had white rousters, which was an event to be remembered and talked about afterward. They were grimy foreigners, who chattered in an outlandish tongue instead of chanting at their work as regular rousters did. This time when the Belle of Memphis came and the personal manager of Daniel the Mystic came up the levee, half a dozen of us were there and saw him coming. We ran down the porch steps and trailed him at a respectful distance, opinion being acutely divided among us as to what he might be. He was associated with the great outer world of amusement and entertainment; we knew that by the circumstances of his apparel and his jewels and high hat and all, even if his whole bearing had not advertised his calling as with banners. Therefore, we speculated freely as we trailed him. He couldn't be the man who owned the Eugene Robinson Floating Palace, because the Floating Palace had paid its annual visit months before and by now must be away down past the Lower Bends in the bayou country. Likewise, the man who came in advance of the circus always arrived by rail with a yellow car full of circus bills and many talented artists in white overalls. I remember I decided that he must have something to do with a minstrel show--Beach & Bowers' maybe, or Thatcher, Primrose & West's.