While keeping up appearances on the Mexican question, by frequent inquiries about the semi-monthly steamers for Vera Cruz, I devoted myself ostensibly to the curious features of the city. Odd enough it sounded to hear persons say, "Let us go up to the river;" but the phrase is accurate. New Orleans is two feet lower than the Mississippi, and protected against overflow by a dike or levee. The city is quite narrow, and is drained into a great swamp in the rear. In front, new deposits of soil are constantly and rapidly made. Four of the leading business streets, nearest the levee, traverse what, a few years ago, was the bed of the river. Anywhere, by digging two feet below the surface, one comes to water.
The earth is peculiarly spongy and yielding. The unfinished Custom House, built of granite from Quincy, Massachusetts, has sunk about two feet since its commencement, in 1846. The same is true of other heavy buildings. Cellars and wells being impossible in the watery soil, refrigerators serve for the one, and cylindrical upright wooden cisterns, standing aboveground, like towers, for the other.
Cemeteries Above the Ground.
In the cemeteries the tombs are called "ovens." They are all built aboveground, of brick, stone, or stucco, closed up with mortar and cement. Sometimes the walls crack open, revealing the secrets of the charnel-house. Decaying coffins are visible within; and once I saw a human skull protruding from the fissure of a tomb. Here, indeed,
"Imperial Cæsar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away."
Despite this revolting feature, the Catholic cemeteries are especially interesting. About the humblest of the monuments, artificial wreaths, well-tended rose-beds, garlands of fresh flowers, changed daily, and vases inserted in the walls, to catch water and attract the birds, evince a tender, unforgetful attention to the resting-place of departed friends. More than half the inscriptions are French or Spanish. Very few make any allusion to a future life. One imposing column marks the grave of Dominique You, the pirate, whose single virtue of patriotism, exhibited under Jackson during the war of 1815, hardly justifies, upon his monument, the magnificent eulogy of Bayard: "The hero of a hundred battles,—a chevalier without fear and without reproach."
In New Orleans, grass growing upon the streets is no sign of decadence. Stimulated by the rich, moist soil, it springs up in profusion, not only in the smaller thoroughfares, but among the bricks and paving-stones of the leading business avenues.
The French Quarter of New Orleans.
Canal street is perhaps the finest promenade on the continent. It is twice the width of Broadway, and in the middle has two lines of trees, with a narrow lawn between them, extending its entire length. At night, as the long parallel rows of gas-lights glimmer through the quivering foliage, growing narrower and narrower in perspective till they unite and blend into one, it is a striking spectacle—a gorgeous feast of the lanterns. On the lower side of it is the "French Quarter," more un-American even than the famous German portion of Cincinnati known as "Over the Rhine." Here you may stroll for hours, "a straggler from another civilization," hearing no word in your native tongue, seeing no object to remove the impression of an ancient French city. The dingy houses, "familiar with forgotten years," call up memories of old Mexican towns. They are grim, dusky relics of antiquity, usually but one story high, with steep projecting roofs, tiled or slated, wooden shutters over the doors, and multitudinous eruptions of queer old gables and dormer windows.