We take our last evening stroll through the streets of New Orleans, which have a fascination unknown to them by day. They are everywhere brilliantly illuminated; we fancy it must be some special occasion, but it is always the same; electric lights and gas-jets in quaint devices are flaring everywhere, strains of music are floating on the air, the shops and stalls are ablaze with brilliant colouring, and appear in fancy dress—as a lady throws off her morning robes and appears en grande toilette for the evening festivities; open air performances, shows, and theatres are in full swing. Strange to say, places that have seemed quiet and harmless, even dingy, during the daytime, bloom out into gambling dens, where the rattling of dice and the rolling of billiard balls make deadly music through the night. How often some haggard form, hunted by ruin and despair, slips like a shadow from these lighted halls; a pistol-shot, a groan, and he vanishes into a darker night, “where never more the sun shall rise or set.” There are no laws against gambling; they are a free people here, and are allowed to choose each his own road to ruin, consequently gambling is carried on to a frightful extent, and by all kinds and conditions of men. It seems indigenous to the soil, for while men stake houses and lands, nay, the very last coin from their pockets, the very children gamble over their tops and marbles or dirt pies in the gutter.
The inhabitants of New Orleans are never tired of expatiating on the beauties of their city, and dilating on the golden history of its romantic past, or the prosperous record of its present day. Their devotion further insists on the general healthiness of its climate; they admit there are occasional epidemics, but then at certain seasons epidemics rage everywhere, they are not specially improvised for New Orleans, and the black population suffers always more than the white.
Lovely though it be—a most quaint, picturesque old city, with its bright skies and gorgeous growth of tropical flowers—no sane person could have faith in its sanitary perfections. A beautiful human nest it is; low-lying, as in a hole scooped out of the solid earth, many feet below the waters of the Mississippi, partially surrounded by swamps of the rankest kind, and girdled by silver streams and deep flowing rivers, it must necessarily be the favourite resort of the malarial fiend. Here that scourge of the South, the yellow fever, too, rising from sweltering earth, sends forth his scorching, blighting breath, and clothes the land in mourning. But every man clings to his own soil; no matter whether it brings forth thorns or roses, he is satisfied with the gathering thereof.
“Well,” exclaimed a devoted citizen as he cheerfully discussed the subject with us, “in every country there is an occasional force which carries off the surplus population; sometimes it is fire, or flood, earthquakes or mining explosions. Nature sends us the yellow fever; of course it is not a pleasant visitor, but it does its work well enough, and I don’t know but it is as well to get out of the world that way as any other.”
It is impossible to enumerate half the pleasant excursions which may be taken from New Orleans. Its wonderful watery highways are among the finest in the world, and wind through the land in all directions. By them you may travel anywhere and everywhere through the loveliest scenery of the South, as pleasantly as though the panorama were passing the windows of your own drawing-room.
Splendid steamers—floating palaces indeed of gigantic proportions, luxuriously upholstered, and fitted with all the carving and gilding so dear to some travellers’ hearts—are eternally passing to and fro. We were strongly disposed to take a trip on the “Natchez,” the sovereign vessel, but time pressed, and we were compelled to move on.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Atlanta.—A wilderness of bricks and mortar.—Lovely surroundings.—Scarlet woods.—Memorial day.—Scenes in the cemetery.
About five o’clock on a sultry afternoon we start on the cars for Atlanta. The train is crowded, the day is bright, the spiritual thermometer stands high, and everybody seems resolved to be social with everybody else; they commence with a running fire of casual gossip, and proceed to give gratuitous information of a confidential character concerning themselves and their families. One gentleman is returning from Texas, and fondly cherishes a banana tree, which he is carrying home to his wife in Atlanta, intending to try and coax it into growing in the garden there. He has tried the experiment before, he tells us, but the banana will not take kindly to the soil; in spite of all care hitherto it has invariably drooped and died. Still, he does not despair; like the lonely scion of a sickly family he will cherish this last, and endeavour to raise a new family on his native soil.
We fare well on this journey; though there are no regular eating stations erected on the way yet we are well provided for. People come on the cars at certain places, bringing plates of broiled chicken and meats, with delicious little brown crisp rolls of bread, hard boiled eggs, and tarts, covered with snow-white napkins, and daintily arranged so as to tempt the appetite; and baskets of delicious grapes and peaches with the tender bloom upon them, and every kind of fruit that is in season. Glasses of iced milk, a delicious beverage, may also be obtained.