ardens were filled
with flowers; yes, bushels of roses were blooming for those who chose to
pluck them; while oranges were turning their green to gold, and figs
were ripening in the sun. It was a Creole plantation,--French the only
language heard. A procession of carts, each drawn by a pair of mules,
and driven by a fat and happy negro, who seemed to joke with every
motion and laugh all over from head to foot, came from the sugar-house
to get wood, of which an immense quantity was lying upon the banks of
the river, saved from the vast mass of forest trees washed down at every
freshet.

I cannot describe the appropriateness of everything on these
plantations. These Creole planters look as if nature had formed them for
good masters; in any other sphere they are out of their element,--here
most decidedly at home. The negroes, male and female, seem made on
purpose for their masters, and the mules were certainly made on purpose
for the negroes. Any imaginable change would destroy this harmonious
relation. Do they not all enjoy alike this paradise,--this scene of
plenty and enchantment? The negroes work and are all the better for such
beneficial exercise, as they would be all the worse without it. They
have their feasts, their holidays,--more liberty than thousands of New
York mechanics enjoy in their lifetimes, and a freedom from care and
anxiety which a poor white man never knows. I begin to think that
Paradise is on the banks of the Mississippi, and that the nearest
approach to the realization of the schemes of Fourier is on our Southern
plantations.

FROM NEW ORLEANS TO RED RIVER.

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED.

[We have given a descriptive sketch of steamboat travel down
the Ohio and Mississippi in the first half of the century, in
what we may almost call the days of the barbarians. It is here
followed by a sketch of steamboating, from New Orleans to and
up the Red River, in the ante-war period, in which will be
found methods as unprogressive and people as uncivilized as in
any period of modern travel. The getting off was a marvel of
procrastination, worthy of the most primitive days of American
travel.]

On a certain Saturday morning, when I had determined on the trip, I
found that two boats, the "Swamp Fox" and the "St. Charles," were
advertised to leave the same evening for the Red River. I went to the
levee, and finding the "St. Charles" to be the better of the two