stained
with neglect; but a gallery it is still, an important social feature of
this outdoor life.

Over the gallery grow the roses; out near at hand a bignonia-vine lifts
its yellow flare aloft and throws down a fluttering shower of bell-like
blooms, and all the air is heavy with the scents of the South. So
through the long evening the people sit upon the gallery and chat or
read or sing or doze or plan or discuss their family affairs. By day the
galleries are protected with gay-colored awnings or those filmy woven
sheets of reeds which keep out the glare and let through the light and
the fragrant breeze. Children make of the gallery a play-house; young
people here entertain their friends; the elders discuss the affairs of a
nation or dwell on that wonderful past through which this ancient
Southern city has come tumultuously down through the lines of Castilian
and Saxon and Gaul.

[Illustration: OLD SPANISH HOUSES.]

If you should take your map of the United States and run your finger far
down its surface until it rested upon the largest city in all the
beautiful South, and the metropolis of a vast inner empire which holds
two civilizations, one French-Spanish, one American, both slowly, very
slowly, merging through the centuries; or, better still, if you should
stroll along the streets on a sweet March day, peering into its curious
quarters, watching the beautiful little children and the dark-eyed men
and the gaily dressed women and all the throngs of people, city people
who can never long remain away from the green fields and the noble old
trees and the scent of the roses--then you could not fail to hit upon
this charming old place, New Orleans--in many ways the most interesting
of all the cities in America, the beautiful city that lives outdoors.

QUEER AMERICAN RIVERS

BY F. H. SPEARMAN

I wonder if my readers realize what a story of the vast extent of our
country is told by its rivers?

Every variety of river in the world seems to have a cousin in our
collection. What other country on the face of the globe affords such an
assortment of streams for fishing and boating and swimming and
skating--besides having any number of streams on which you can do none
of these things? One can hardly imagine rivers like that; but we have
them, plenty of them, as you shall see.

As for fishing, the American boy may cast his flies for salmon in the
Arctic circle, or angle for sharks under a tropical sun in Florida