While there a gentleman took us in his carriage to the earthworks
constructed by the soldiers as a fortification, taking great pains to
explain all to me, and allowed me to use the usual sense of feeling, which
so often served in lieu of sight.

At Jackson, Miss., I was a guest of the same hotel in which lived General
Beauregard, who was Superintendent of the Jackson and New Orleans Railway,
and who, aside from other acts of kindness and civility, freely tendered
me a pass over his road.

My stay at the "Crescent City" was not only marked by great business
success, but the three weeks of sight-seeing was a "continued feast."

Although it was now the middle of January, flowery spring "seemed
lingering in the lap of winter." The perfume of the violet, the scent of
the rose, the gladness of the sun-beam and the brightness of the skies
will ever linger in memory, while the geniality and goodness of its people
will, in the "dimness of distance," glimmer like a soft love-light in the
life of the blind girl.

I visited the French market, and drank a cup of the famed and fragrant
Mocha; went to its cemeteries, which, in their flowery beauty, robbed
death of its terrors; took a drive upon the shell road to Lake
Pontchartrain; walked in Jackson Square; and, indeed, visited all
localities of note in and around the city.

Should my curious readers wish to know how I could enjoy and describe all
these, the answer will be found in my companion and friend, Hattie, who,
with her wonderful adaptation and ingenuity, added to her remarkable
descriptive powers, vividly pictured all to me, and, through an unwritten,
indescribable language known only to ourselves, it became a system of
mental telegraphy and soul language.

There is in Europe a blind man, whose name I cannot recall, who is led
from Court to Court and from palace to palace by a frail young girl, and
between these there exists the same mystic yet unerring language. What
this little fairy is to him such was Hattie Hudson to me, or, to use the
language of another:

"She was my sight;
The ocean to the river of my thoughts,
Which terminated all."

CHAPTER XV.

"Devotion wafts the mind above,
But Heaven itself descends in love;
A feeling from the Godhead caught.
To wean from earth each sordid thought;
A ray of him who formed the whole,
A glory circling round the soul."

Leaving New Orleans with the fervid fire whi