ew York," Professor Brander Matthews.

Another distinguished name in letters, connected with the place, is that
of Lafcadio Hearn, who was at one time a reporter on a New Orleans
newspaper, and who not only wrote about the French quarter, but
collected many proverbs of the Creoles in a book which he called "Gombo
Zebes." In his little volume, "Chita," Hearn described the land of
lakes, bayous, and _chenieres_, which forms a strip between the city and
the Gulf, and which, with its wild birds, wild scenery, and wild storms,
and its extraordinary population of hunters and fishermen--Cajuns,
Italians, Japanese, Spanish, Kanakas, Filipinos, French, and half-breed
Indians, all intermarrying--is the strangest, most outlandish section of
this country I have ever visited. The Filipinos, who introduced shrimp
fishing in this region, building villages on stilts, like those of their
own islands, were not there when Hearn wrote "Chita," nor was Ludwig
raising diamond-back terrapin on Grand Isle, but the live-oaks, draped
with sad Spanish moss, lined the bayous as they do to-day, and the
alligators, turtles and snakes were there, and the tall marsh grass, so
like bamboo, fringed the banks as it does now, and water hyacinth
carpeted the pools, and the savage tropical storms came sweeping in, now
and then, from the Gulf, flooding the entire country, tearing everything
up by the roots, then receding, carrying the floating debris back with
them to the salt sea. One has to see what they call a "slight" storm, in
that country, to know what a great storm there must be. Hearn surely saw
storms there, for in "Chita" he describes with terrifying vividness that
historic tempest which, in 1856, obliterated, at one stroke, Last
Island, with its fashionable hotel and all the guests of that hotel. I
have seen a "little" thunderstorm in Barataria Bay and I do not want to
see a big one. I have seen brown men who, in the storm of 1915 (which
did a million dollars' worth of damage in New Orleans), floated about
the Baratarias for days, upon the roofs of houses, and I have seen
little children, half Italian, half Filipino, who were saved by being
carried by their parents into the branches of an old live-oak, where
they waited until good Horace Harvey, "the little father of the
Baratarias," came down there in his motor yacht, the _Destrehan_,
rescued them, warmed them, fed them, and gave them back to life. I was
told in New Orleans that there were ten sec