ause"! I remember the long stretch of burnt
locomotives standing on the tracks at Mobile; of Christ Church, where
the consecration of Dr. Pierce was held, with its decoration of orange
branches in fruit and flower; of the brilliant reception held at the
residence of our hostess, Mrs. Perry; and the drawing-room, filled with
flowers and elegantly dressed women; while a wood fire, all aglow, gave
us a reminder that we must make believe it was winter, because it was
January. Then there was the steamboat ride from Mobile _via_ Lake
Pontchartrain, and thence to New Orleans. The city has changed much in
these years. We stayed then at the old St. Charles, surely an old fire
trap, as events proved, but stately for all that. The culmination of
each day was the hotel dinner; and a daily parade, well worth seeing,
was the progress of the ladies across the huge rotunda, through the
lounging crowd, to the dining-room. All that is now gone, and the new
St. Charles gets along without this primitive and, I must say, pleasing
display.

A memory also abides with me which I surely may rehearse. It was a
dinner given to visiting ecclesiastics and lay dignitaries at the
hospitable home of Dr. Mercer in Canal Street. If I am right, he was a
bachelor; he lived in great elegance in his own house. The dinner was
thoroughly Southern, and so intended. I still have pleasing
reminiscences of the gumbo soup; and a boned turkey, boiled, and
stuffed with oysters, ought not, and can not, ever be forgotten. It was
pallid, but palatable, in its moist modesty, and a cut right through
its entire circumference was something to be brought away as a grateful
remembrance, safely disposed within the inner man.

V

Impressions of New Orleans.--Its Harbor.--The Levee at Night.--Southern
Texas.--Its Forests, Flowers, and Birds.--The Prairie Pool.

We left New Orleans at 8.40 P.M., on Monday, with visions of broad,
unpaved streets embowered in trees; of stately mansions in enclosed
gardens; of the huge levee, which, like a giant laid at length, pushes
its shoulders against the ever-threatening flood of the mighty
Mississippi. Our ladies, too, had additional memories of the shopping
districts; of ill-smelling open drains which offended them; of
ravishing summer goods of cotton and silk from the looms of France; of
exquisite bijouterie tempting to one's purse; of great square paving
blocks which seemed made to float; and over all the remembrance of the
y