THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--bears no resemblance to the American end of the city:the American end which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center.The houses are massed in blocks;are austerely plain and dignified;uniform of pattern,with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect;all are plastered on the outside,and nearly all have long,iron-railed verandas running along the several stories.
Their chief beauty is the deep,warm,varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster.
It harmonizes with all the surroundings,and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds.
This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated;neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.
The iron railings are a specialty,also.The pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty,and airy and graceful--with a large cipher or monogram in the center,a delicate cobweb of baffling,intricate forms,wrought in steel.The ancient railings are hand-made,and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable.
They are become BRIC-A-BRAC.
The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius,the author of 'the Grandissimes.'In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.
In truth,I find by experience,that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it,and learn of it,and judge of it,more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it.
With Mr.Cable along to see for you,and describe and explain and illuminate,a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure.And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid,and yet fitful and darkling;you glimpse salient features,but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination:a case,as it were,of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.
We visited the old St.Louis Hotel,now occupied by municipal offices.
There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it;but one can say of it as of the Academy of Music in New York,that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact.
It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy of Music;but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by the benches,and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles.
The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole-bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head to the establishment.
We visited also the venerable Cathedral,and the pretty square in front of it;the one dim with religious light,the other brilliant with the worldly sort,and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs;then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond,where the villas are,and the water wheels to drain the town,and the commons populous with cows and children;passing by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate;but we took him on trust,and did not visit him.He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history;and as long as he preserved unspotted,in retirement,the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling,homage and reverence were his from high and low;but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman,the public 'shook'him,and turned aside and wept.
When he died,they set up a monument over him;and little by little he has come into respect again;but it is respect for the pirate,not the alderman.
To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was,and charitably forget what he became.
Thence,we drove a few miles across a swamp,along a raised shell road,with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other;and here and there,in the distance,a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress,top standing out,clear cut against the sky,and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures--such was our course and the surroundings of it.There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal,and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank,flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite.
And by-and-bye we reached the West End,a collection of hotels of the usual light summer-resort pattern,with broad verandas all around,and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds.
We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano,delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.
Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and to Spanish Fort every evening,and dine,listen to the bands,take strolls in the open air under the electric lights,go sailing on the lake,and entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways.
We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano.
Notably,at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city.
He was in his last possible perfection there,and justified his fame.
In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones;as large as one's thumb--delicate,palatable,appetizing.Also deviled whitebait;also shrimps of choice quality;and a platter of small soft-shell crabs of a most superior breed.The other dishes were what one might get at Delmonico's,or Buckingham Palace;those I have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only,I suppose.
In the West and South they have a new institution--the Broom Brigade.
It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume,and go through the infantry drill,with broom in place of musket.