ot heard that they
also took the license of the Italian.

Public and open improprieties were at once frowned down, and people of
all grades and classes seemed to make their chief study good taste.
This is another French graft, on a stem naturally susceptible, of which
the consequences can be seen from the hair ribbon of the _bonne_ to the
decoration of the Cathedral.

The women of New Orleans, as a rule, dress with more taste--more
perfect adaptation of form and color to figure and complexion--than any
in America. On a dress night at the opera, at church, or at a ball, the
_toillettes_ are a perfect study in their exquisite fitness--their
admirable blending of simplicity and elegance. Nor is this confined to
the higher and more wealthy classes. The women of lower conditions are
admirably imitative; and on Sunday afternoons, where they crowd to hear
the public bands with husbands and children, all in their best, it is
the rarest thing to see a badly-trimmed bonnet or an ill-chosen
costume. The men, in those days, dressed altogether in the French
fashion; and were, consequently, the worst dressed in the world.

The most independent and obtrusively happy people one noticed in New
Orleans were the negroes. They have a sleek, shiny blackness here,
unknown to higher latitudes; and from its midst the great white
eyeballs and large, regular teeth flash with a singular brilliance.
Sunday is _their_ day peculiarly--and on the warm afternoons, they bask
up and down the thoroughfares in the gaudiest of orange and scarlet
bandannas. But their day is fast passing away; and in place of the
simple, happy creatures of a few years gone, we find the discontented
and besotted idler--squalid and dirty.

The cant of to-day--that the race problem, if left alone, will settle
itself--may have some possible proof in the distant future; but the few
who are ignorant enough to-day to believe the "negro question" already
settled may find that they are yet but on the threshold of the
"irrepressible conflict" between nature and necessity.

To the natural impressibility of the southron, the Louisianian adds the
enthusiasm of the Frenchman. At the first call of the governor for
troops, there had been readiest response; and here, as in Alabama, the
very first young men of the state left office and counting-room and
college to take up the musket. Two regiments of regulars, in the state
service, were raised to man the forts--"Jackson" and "St. Philip"