"Your mother must be very old."

"You may know she 's dat, for I 'm one of her baby chil'n, and I's got 'leven of my own. I've a heap better time now 'n I had when I was in bondage. I had to nus' my chil'n four times a day and pick two hundred pounds cotton besides. My third husband went off to de Yankees. My first was sold away from me. Now I have my second husband again; I was sold away from him, but I found him again, after I'd lived with my third husband thirteen years.

I asked if he was willing to take her back.

"He was willing to have me again on any terms," emphatically "for he knowed I was Number One!

66

Several native French inhabitants took passage at various points along the river, below the Mississippi line. All spoke very good French, and a few conversed well in English. One, from Point Coupée Parish, said: "Before the war, there were over seventeen thousand inhabitants in our parish." (In Louisiana a county is called a parish.) Nearly thirteen thousand were slaves. Many of the free inhabitants were colored; so that there were about four colored persons to one white. We made yearly between eight and nine thousand hogsheads of sugar, and fifteen hundred bales of cotton. The war has left us only three thousand inhabitants. We sent fifteen hundred men into the Confederate army. All the French population were in favor of secession. The white inhabitants of these parishes are mostly French Creoles. We treated our slaves better than the Americans treated theirs. We did n We didn't work them so hard; and there was more familiarity and kindly feeling between us and our servants. The children were raised together; and a white child learned the negroes' patois before he learned French. The patois is curious: a negro says ‹ Moi pas connais' for 'Je ne sais pas' (I do not know); and they use a great many African words which you would not understand. Our slaves were never sold except to settle an estate. Besides these two classes there was a third, quite separate, which did not associate with either of the others. They were the free colored, of French-African descent, some almost or

quite white, with many large property holders and slave-owners among them; a very respectable class, forming a society of their own."

The villages and plantation dwellings along here, with their low roofs and sunny verandas, on the level river bank, had a peculiarly foreign and tropical appearance.

The levees of Louisiana form a much more extensive and complete system than those of Mississippi. In the latter State there is much hilly land that does not need their protection, and much swamp land not worth protecting; and there is, I believe, no law regarding them. In the low and level State of Louisiana, however, a large and fertile part of which lies. considerably below the level of high water, there is very strict legislation on the subject, compelling every land-owner on the river to keep up his levees. This year the State itself had undertaken to repair them, issuing eight per cent. bonds to the amount of a million dollars for the purpose, the expense of the work to be defrayed eventually by the planters.

For a long distance the Lower Mississippi, at high water, appears to be flowing upon a ridge. The river has built up its own banks higher than the country which lies back of them; and the levees have raised them still higher. Behind this fertile strip there are extensive swamps, containing a soil of unsurpassed depth and richness, but unavailable for want of drainage. Three methods are proposed for bringing them under cultivation. First, to surround them by levees, ditch them, and pump the water out by steam. Second, to cut a canal through them to the Gulf. Third, to turn the Mississippi into them, and fill them with its alluvial deposit. This last method is no doubt the one Nature intended to employ; and it is the opinion of many that man, confining the flow of the stream within artificial limits, attempted the settlement of this country several centuries too soon.

A remarkable feature of Louisiana scenery is its forests of cypress-trees growing out of the water, heavy, sombre, and shaggy with moss.

The complexion of the river water is a light mud-color,

which it derives from the turbid Missouri, - the Upper Mis sissippi being a clear stream. Pour off a glass of it after it has been standing a short time, and a sediment of dark mud appears at the bottom. Notwithstanding this unpleasant peculiarity, it is used altogether for cooking and drinking purposes on board the steamboats, and I found New Orleans supplied with it.

A curious fact has been suggested with regard to this wonderful river, that it runs up hill. Its mouth is said to be two and a half miles higher-or farther from the earth's centre than its source. When we consider that the earth is a spheroid, with an axis shorter by twenty-six miles than its equatorial diameter; and that the same centrifugal motion which has caused the equatorial protuberance tends still to heap up the waters of the globe where that motion is greatest; the seeming impossibility appears possible, just as we see a revolving grindstone send the water on its surface to the rim. Stop the grindstone, and the water flows down its sides. Stop the earth's revolution, and immediately you will see the Mississippi River turn and flow the other way.

Some years ago I made a voyage of several days on the Upper Mississippi, to the head of navigation. It was difficult to realize that this was the same stream on which I was now sailing day after day in an opposite direction,-six days in all, from Memphis to New Orleans. From St. Anthony's Falls to the Gulf, the Mississippi is navigable twenty-two hundred miles. Its entire length is three thousand miles.. Its great tributary, the Missouri, is alone three thousand miles in length measured from its head-waters to the Gulf, it is four thousand five hundred miles. Consider also the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red River, and the hundred lesser streams that fall into it, and well may we call it by its Indian name, MichiSepe, the Father of Waters.

FRENCH QUARTER. — NAMES OF STREETS. 397

CHAPTER LVI.

THE CRESCENT CITY.

ON the morning of January 1st, 1866, I arrived at New Orleans.

It was midwinter; but the mild sunny weather that followed the first chill days of rain, made me fancy it May. The gardens of the city were verdant with tropical plants. White roses in full bloom climbed upon trellises or the verandas of houses. Oleander trees, bananas with their broad drooping leaves six feet long, and Japan plums that ripen in February, grew side by side in the open air. There were orange-trees whose golden fruit could be picked from the balconies which they half concealed. Magnolias, gray-oaks and live-oaks, some heavily hung with moss that swung in the breeze like waving hair, shaded the yards and streets. I found the roadsides of the suburbs green with grass, and the vegetable gardens checkered and striped with delicately contrasting rows of lettuce, cabbages, carrots, beets, onions, and peas in blossom.

The French quarter of the city impresses you as a foreigr town transplanted to the banks of the Mississippi. Many of the houses are very ancient, with low, moss-covered roofs projecting over the first story, like slouched hat-brims over quaint old faces. The more modern houses are often very elegant, and not less picturesque. The names of the streets are Pagan, foreign, and strange. The gods and muses of mythology, the saints of the Church, the Christian virtues, and modern heroes, are all here. You have streets of "Good Children," of " Piety," of "Apollo," of "St. Paul," of "Euterpe," and all their relations. The shop-signs are in French, or in French and English. The people you meet have a foreign air and speak a foreign tongue. Their complexions range through all hues, from the

dark Creole to the ebon African. The anomalous third class. of Louisiana - the respectable free colored people of FrenchAfrican descent-are largely represented. Dressed in silks, accompanied by their servants, and speaking good French, for many of them are well educated, -the ladies and children of this class enter the street cars, which they enliven with the Parisian vivacity of their conversation.

ance.

The mingling of foreign and American elements has given to New Orleans a great variety of styles of architecture; and the whole city has a light, picturesque, and agreeable appearIt is built upon an almost level strip of land bordering upon the left bank of the river, and falling back from the levee with an imperceptible slope to the cypress and alligator swamps in the rear. The houses have no cellars. I noticed that the surface drainage of the city flowed back from the river into the Bayou St. John, a navigable inlet of Lake Ponchartrain. The old city front lay upon a curve of the Mississippi, which gave it a crescent shape: hence its poetic soubriquet. The modern city has a river front seven miles in extent, bent like the letter S.

The broad levee, lined with wharves on one side and belted by busy streets on the other, crowded with merchandise, and thronged with merchants, boatmen, and laborers, presents always a lively and entertaining spectacle. Steam and sailing crafts of every description, arriving, departing, loading, unloading, and fringing the city with their long array of smoke-pipes and masts, give you some idea of the commerce of New Orleans.

Here is the great cotton market of the world. In looking over the cotton statistics of the past thirty years, I found that nearly one half the crop of the United States had passed through this port. In 1855-1856 (the mercantile cotton year beginning September 1st and ending August 31st) 1,795,023 bales were shipped from New Orleans,986,622 to Great Britain (chiefly to Liverpool); 244,814 to France (chiefly to Havre); 162,657 to the North of Europe; 178,812 to the South of Europe, Mexico, &c.; and 222,100 coastwise, –