der picture of the woman he adores. I admire her
for building character, but it is by her languorous beauty that I am
infatuated, and the portrait which most effectively displays that beauty
is the one for which I care.

Her very failings were so much a part of her that they made us the more
sympathetic; she was too lovely to be greatly blamed for anything;
gazing into her eyes, we hardly noticed that there was dust under the
piano and in the corners; dining at her sumptuous table, we gave but
little thought to the fact that the cellar was damp, the house none too
healthy, and that there were mosquitoes and rats about the place; nor
did it seem to matter, in face of her allurements, that she was
shiftless, extravagant, improvident in the management of her affairs. If
these things were brought to our attention, we excused them on the
grounds of Latin blood and enervating climate.

But if we excused her, she did not excuse herself. Without being shaken
awake by an earthquake, or forced to action by a devastating fire or
flood, she set to work, calmly and of her own volition, to reform her
character.

First she cleaned house, providing good surface drainage, an excellent
filtered water supply from the river in place of her old
mosquito-breeding cisterns, and modern sewers in place of cesspools. She
killed rats by the hundreds of thousands, rat-proofed her buildings, and
thus, at one stroke, eliminated all fear of bubonic plague. She began to
take interest in the public schools, and soon trebled their advantages.
She concerned herself with the revision of repressive tax laws. She
secured one of the best street railway systems in the country. But,
perhaps most striking of all, she set to work to build scientifically
toward the realization of a gigantic dream. This dream embodies the
resumption by New Orleans of her old place as second seaport city. To
this end she is doing more than any other city to revive the commerce of
the Mississippi River, and is at the same time making a strong bid for
trade by way of the Panama Canal, as well as other sea traffic. She has
restored her forty miles of water front to the people, has built
municipal docks and warehouses at a cost of millions, and has so
perfectly cooerdinated her river-rail-sea traffic-handling agencies that
rates have been greatly reduced. Upon these, and related enterprises,
upward of a hundred millions are being spent, and the vast plan is
working out with such pro