ST THING IN NATURE

The city, bustling and animated by day, like an energetic housewife,
was at night a gay demoiselle, awakening to new life and excitement.
The clerk betook himself to his bowling or billiards and the mechanic
to the circus, while beauty and fashion repaired to the concert room
or to the Opera Francais, to listen to Halevy or Donizetti. Restless
Americans or Irishmen rubbed elbows with the hurrying Frenchman or
Spaniard, and the dignified creole gentleman of leisure alone was
wrapped in a plenitude of dignity, computing probably the interest he
drew on money loaned these assiduous foreigners.

Soldiers who had been granted leave of absence or had slipped the
guard at the camp on Andrew Jackson's battle-ground swaggered through
the streets. The change from a diet of pork and beans and army hard
tack was so marked that Uncle Sam's young men threw restraint to the
winds, took the mask balls by storm and gallantly assailed and made
willing prisoners of the fair sex. Eager to exchange their irksome
life in camp for the active campaign in Mexico, it was small wonder
they relieved their impatience by many a valiant dash into the
hospitable town.

Carriages drove by with a rumble and a clatter, revealing a fleeting
glimpse of some beauty with full, dark eye. Venders of flowers
importuned the passers-by, doing a brisk business; the oyster and
coffee stands reminded the spectator of a thoroughfare in London on a
Saturday night, with the people congregating about the street stalls;
but the brilliantly illumined places of amusement, with their careless
patrons plainly apparent to all from without, resembled rather a
boulevard scene in the metropolis of France. "Probably," says a
skeptical chronicler, "here and there are quiet drawing-rooms, and
tranquil firesides, where domestic love is a chaste, presiding
goddess." But the writer merely presumes such might have been the
case, and it is evident from his manner of expression, he offers the
suggestion, or afterthought, charitably, with some doubts in his mind.
Certainly he never personally encountered the chaste goddess of the
hearth, or he would have qualified his words and made his statement
more positive.

From the life of the streets, the land baron turned into a well-lighted
entrance, passing into a large, luxuriously furnished saloon, at one
end of which stood a table somewhat resembling a roulette board.
Seated on one side was the phlegmatic cashier, a