beating back the
rays of the sun defiantly and gaining fresh strength in the struggle. On
such a bush one day I counted two hundred and ninety roses.

This city which lives outdoors must play most in the open, and in its
noble park, with its vast stretches of bright green, here empurpled by
masses of the dainty grass-flower, there yellowing with the sheen of the
buttercup, one finds the tireless golf-players leisurely strolling over
the links; from yonder come the cries of the boys at ball; and in the
farther distance you may see through the frame-like branches of a
giant live-oak the students of a great university hard set at a
game of tennis. And yet--is it the air, or the race, or the
traditions?--something it is which makes the sportsmen, like the spring,
seem slow to move.

[Illustration: FAR IN THE PINEY WOODS.]

And here even the palms grow outdoors in the city yards. And should you
go past the city's limits, and yet within seeing distance of its
blue-tiled housetops, you will find the palms growing rank in the great
swamps, which you must search if you care to hunt for the languid
alligators--palms growing so thick and rank that it is quite like
looking into some vast conservatory, with the blue dome of the sky for
glass. And here grow the magnolias in their wild, barbaric splendor of
bloom, and the live-oaks, mighty of girth and spread, draped in somber
gray moss as if for the funeral of some god of the deep green wood. At
the fringe of the swamp, tempting you until near to jumping into the
morass after them, are the huge fleurs-de-lis, each gorgeous blossom
fully seven inches across its purple top.

To the north, somewhat apart from the reach of the treacherous river,
lie the health-giving piny woods, and along the big, sullen stream the
sugar plantations, some of them still the home of a lavish hospitality,
some of them transformed into mere places of trade, where thrift and
push have elbowed out all that fine gallantry and ease and ample
hospitality of an earlier day--that hospitality which will ever remain a
leading characteristic of the people. To be a Southern man or a Southern
woman and to be inhospitable--that is not possible in the nature of
things.

[Illustration: A PICTURESQUE FRONT IN THE FRENCH QUARTER.]

It is, when all is said and done, on the gallery that this city lives
most of its life--on the gallery even more than on the evening-thronged
banquette, which is the sidewalk of the North,