panying remarks being elicited descriptive of
its rapid increase, its singular position, and motley population,
together with the speculations founded on the promise of its future
greatness derived from its present healthful condition; that is, its
political and commercial sanity; since no term can be worse applied, as
illustrative of the views entertained of it by the North, whether
physically or morally considered; views however that, on both these
points, I have decided are singularly overcharged, even by persons one
would conceive possessed of the information likely to lead to a correct
judgment. This I attribute partly to the habit we are in of taking
reports of places for granted, and repeating them from father to son
without much personal examination, or rather comparison, and partly to
the changes constantly operating upon society here, with a rapidity at
least equal to the growth of building or the increase of produce and
population; changes which come like Duncan's couriers, "thick as hail,"
the last giving the flat lie to the truth just told; to be, in turn,
proved false by a successor.

To a stranger, the point of observance most original and striking, and
which will at once inform and interest him, is the view from the Levee,
with a walk along this artificial embankment, which commencing a hundred
miles above New Orleans, and thence waiting on the stream whose rule it
circumscribes, here bends like a drawn bow about the city, forming a
well-frequented quay of some seven miles.

For three miles of this, the Levee is bordered by tiers of merchant
shipping from every portion of the trading world, and close against it,
those of the greatest tonnage, having once chosen a berth, may load or
unload without shifting a line; a facility derived from nature that no
port in the world can rival.

Along the whole extent of this line situated below the Levee, but at a
distance of some two hundred feet, runs a range of store-houses,
cotton-presses, and shops, connected by tolerably well-flagged
side-walks; and certainly in no other place is such accommodation more
absolutely required, the middle space or street, so called, being, after
rain, a slough, to which that of Despond, as described by Bunyan, was a
_bagatelle_; and floundering through, or pounded in which, are lines of
hundreds of light drays, each drawn by three or four fine mules, and
laden with the great staple, cotton.[3]

At both extremities of the tiers o