What modern social balls can compare with the Indian balls where saffron sirens with sweet look and voice led the dance through love’s labyrinth of jealousy! Now there is horse racing and private and polite gambling—then there was wide open faro and roulette, and later the Louisiana lottery.
Women did not possess the face and figure characteristic of modern New Orleans belles, but there society was very select, in fact, they were “selected” from hospitals and correction homes. Later there came a shipment of “casket girls,” poor girls sent over from Paris by the King as wives. They brought their trousseau in a chest of clothes. This seems very primitive to us now, yet today men pick wives no better than these, and some they choose do not wear clothes enough for a shroud in the coffin.
The city was once a sink or swamp filled with deported galley-slaves, trappers, miners, gold hunters and soldiers whose profession was dice, dueling and idleness. Today it is the big, busy, commercial city of the South. Once there was fever, filth and filibusters, but these things are no longer in fashion. New Orleans now buys white rice, cotton and sugar—in early days she bought black slaves from San Domingo and Guinea.
Charles Lamb liked old things—he would have enjoyed the old part of town with its bizarre balconies, mountain-peaked roofs, hill-shaped sheds, begrimed, battered stairways, open flowery courts, shady portieres, quaint doorways, and ramshackle, rickety rows of houses marshalled on both sides of the streets like awkward squads of soldiers. In the quiet streets one looks in doorways where the inhabitants, listless lazy lovers of pleasure, are dozing away Life’s afternoon. Here you find the beautiful and bewitching Creoles, coquettish damsels whose baby years were cuddled and cradled in sentimental songs such as “I love you as a little pig loves the mud.”
The pleasure-seeker is “stuck” on New Orleans with its lasses, molasses, lassitude and laissez-faire morals.
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Thash Our Stashon
The conductor and a brakeman on a Montana railroad differ as to the proper pronunciation of the name Eurelia. Passengers are often startled upon arrival at the station to hear the conductor yell, “You’re a liar, you’re a liar.” Then from the brakeman at the other end comes the cry, “You really are, you really are.”
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