n which
showed how early in life savage ideas are imbibed here. Two lads, the
eldest about fifteen, had gone over from New Orleans to shoot ducks.
They were both very gentlemanly-looking boys, and evidently attending
some school. Their conversation of course turned upon fighting--when did
schoolboys meet that it was not so? At last, the younger lad said--

"Well, what do you think of Mike Maloney?", "Oh! Mike is very good with
his fists; but I can whip him right off at rough-and-tumble."

Now, what is "rough-and-tumble?" It consists of clawing, scratching,
kicking, hair-pulling, and every other atrocity, for which, I am happy
to think, a boy at an English school would be well flogged by the
master, and sent to Coventry by his companions. Yet, here was as nice a
looking lad as one could wish to see, evidently the son of well-to-do
parents, glorying in this savage, and, as we should call it, cowardly
accomplishment. I merely mention this to show how early the mind is
tutored to feelings which doubtless help to pave the way for the
bowie-knife in more mature years.

The theatres at New Orleans are neat and airy. Lola Montez succeeded in
creating a great _furore_, at last. I say "at last," because, as there
really is nothing in her acting above mediocrity, she received no
especial encouragement at first, although she had chosen her own career
in Bavaria as the subject in which to make her _debut._ She waited with
considerable tact till she was approaching those scenes in which the mob
triumph over order; and then, pretending to discover a cabal in the
meagre applause she was receiving, she stopped in the middle of her
acting, and, her eyes flashing fire, her face beaming brass, and her
voice wild with well-assumed indignation, she cried--"I'm anxious to do
my best to please the company; but if this cabal continues, I must
retire!" The effect was electric. Thunders of applause followed, and
"Bravo, Lolly!" resounded through the theatre, from the nigger-girl in
the upper gallery to the octogenarian in the pit. When the clamour had
subsided, some spicy attacks on kingcraft and the nobles followed most
opportunely; the shouts were redoubled; her victory was complete. When
the piece was over, she came forward to assure the company that the
scenes she had been enacting were all facts in which she had, in
reality, played the same part she had been representing that evening.
Thunders of "Go it, Lolly! you're a game 'un, and nurth