New Orleans is the most Parisian of American cities. Opera-houses, theaters, and all other places of amusement are open on Sunday nights. The great French market wears its crowning glory only on Sunday mornings. Then the venders occupy not only several spacious buildings, but adjacent streets and squares. Their wares seem boundless in variety. Any thing you please—edible, drinkable, wearable, ornamental, or serviceable—from Wenham ice to vernal flowers and tropical fruits—from Indian moccasins to a silk dress-pattern—from ancient Chinese books to the freshest morning papers—ask, and it shall be given unto you.
French Market on Sunday Morning.
Sit down in a stall, over your tiny cup of excellent coffee, and you are hobnobbing with the antipodes—your next neighbor may be from Greenland's icy mountains, or India's coral strand. Get up to resume your promenade, and you hear a dozen languages in as many steps; while every nation, and tribe, and people—French, English, Irish, German, Spanish, Creole, Chinese, African, Quadroon, Mulatto, American—jostles you in good-humored confusion.
Some gigantic negresses, with gaudy kerchiefs, like turbans, about their heads, are selling fruits, and sit erect as palm-trees. They look like African or Indian princesses, a little annoyed at being separated from their thrones and retinues, but none the less regal "for a' that." At every turn little girls, with rich Creole complexions and brilliant eyes, offer you aromatic bouquets of pinks, roses, verbenas, orange and olive blossoms, and other flowers to you unknown, unless, being a woman, you are a botanist by "gift of fortune," or, a man, that science has "come by nature."
Upon Jackson Square, a delicious bit of verdure fronting the river, gloom antique public buildings, which were the seat of government in the days of the old Spanish régime. Near them stands the equally ancient cathedral, richly decorated within, where devout Catholics still worship. Its great congregations are mosaics of all hues and nationalities, mingling for the moment in the democratic equality of the Roman Church.
Attending service in the cathedral one Sunday morning, I found the aisles crowded with volunteers who, on the eve of departure for the debatable ground of Fort Pickens, had assembled to witness the consecration of their Secession flag, a ceremonial conducted with great pomp and solemnity by the French priests.
In the First Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Dr. Palmer, a divine of talent and local reputation, might be heard advocating the extremest Rebel views. The southerners had formerly been very bitter in their denunciation of political preaching; but now the pulpit, as usual, made obeisance to the pews, and the pews beamed encouragement on the pulpit.
Pressing Cotton by Machinery.
If I may go abruptly from church to cotton—and they were not far apart in New Orleans—a visit to one of the great cotton-presses was worthy of note. It is a low building, occupying an entire square, with a hollow court in the center. It was filled with heaped-up cotton-bales, which overran their limits and covered the adjacent sidewalks. Negroes stood all day at the doors receiving and discharging cotton. The bales are compressed by heavy machinery, driven by steam, that they may occupy the least space in shipping. They are first condensed on the plantations by screw-presses; the cotton is compact upon arrival here; but this great iron machine, which embraces the bales in a hug of two hundred tons, diminishes them one-third more. The laborers are negroes and Frenchmen, who chant a strange, mournful refrain in time with their movements.
The ropes of a bale are cut; it is thrown under the press; the great iron jaws of the monster close convulsively, rolling it under the tongue as a sweet morsel. The ropes are tightened and again tied, the cover stitched up, and the bale rolled out to make room for another—all in about fifty seconds. It weighs five hundred pounds, but the workmen siezeseize it on all sides with their iron hooks, and toss it about like a schoolboy's ball. The superintendent informed me that they pressed, during the previous winter, more than forty thousand bales.