wellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I
mean--and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are
spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas,
or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions
stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses,
out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and
many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with
their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and
comfortable-looking.

One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty
cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which
is propped against the house-corner on stilts. There is a
mansion-and-brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very
incongruous at first. But the people cannot have wells, and so they
take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or
graves,{footnote [The Israelites are buried in graves--by permission, I
take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are
buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep.]}
the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and
few of the living complain, and none of the others.

Chapter 42 Hygiene and Sentiment

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have
a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble,
generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks
and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a
thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching
into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all
at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and
are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business
streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those
people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do
after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides,
their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.
Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many
of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and
children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow
finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in t