e added: "Wait!"

And they were real models, the New Orleans hotels of those days, and
the colonel's commendations were but deserved. In _cuisine_, service
and wines, they far surpassed any on this continent; and for variety of
patrons they were unequaled anywhere.

Two distinct sets inhabited the larger ones, as antagonistic as oil and
water. The _habitues_, easy, critical to a degree, and particular to a
year about their wines, lived on comfortably and evenly, enjoying the
very best of the luxurious city, and never having a cause for
complaint. The up-river people flocked in at certain seasons by the
hundred. They crowded the lobbies, filled the spare bed-rooms, and eat
what was put before them, with but little knowledge save that it was
French. These were the business men, who came down for a new engagement
with a factor, or to rest after the summer on the plantation. One-half
of them were terribly busy; the other half having nothing to do after
the first day--they always stay a week--and assuming an air of high
criticism that was as funny to the knowing ones as expensive to them.

At our hotel, one evening, as favored guests, we found ourselves on an
exploring tour with mine host. It ended in the wine-room.

The mysteries of that vaulted chamber were seldom opened to the outer
world; and passing the _profanum vulgus_ in its first bins, we listened
with eager ears and watering mouths to recital of the pedigree and
history of the dwellers within.

Long rows of graceful necks, golden crowned and tall, peered over dust
and cobwebs of near a generation; bottles aldermanic and plethoric
seemed bursting with the hoarded fatness of the vine; clear, white
glass burned a glowing ruby with the Burgundy; and lean, jaundiced
bottles--carefully bedded like rows of invalids--told of rare and
priceless Hocks.

From arch to arch our garrulous _cicerone_ leads us, with a heightened
relish as we get deeper among his treasures and further away from the
daylight.

"There!" he exclaims at last with a great gulp of triumph. "There!
that's _Sherry_, the king of wines! Ninety years ago, the Conde Pesara
sent that wine in his own ships. Ninety years ago--and for twenty it
has lain in my cellar, never touched but by my own hand"--and he holds
up the candle to the shelf, inch deep in dust, while the light seems to
dart into the very heart of the amber fluid, and sparkle and laugh back
again from the fantastic drapery the spiders had fe