ime in the _Century Magazine_, we can
conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its
multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric
facades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its
picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves,
dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out
of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green
batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron,
framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine
the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as
they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses
decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels,
American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards
and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings.

We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river
bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of
the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow
of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria
and the Gulf.

He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal
splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide
its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left
untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined,
refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to
allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.

We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through
the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the
great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow
as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors
from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus,
Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing
the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the
face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves
at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New
Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as
their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to
distin