We take our last evening stroll through the streets of New Orleans, which have a fascination unknown to them by day. They are everywhere brilliantly illuminated; we fancy it must be some special occasion, but it is always the same; electric lights and gas-jets in quaint devices are flaring everywhere, strains of music are floating on the air, the shops and stalls are ablaze with brilliant colouring, and appear in fancy dress--as a lady throws off her morning robes and appears _en grande toilette_ for the evening festivities; open air performances, shows, and theatres are in full swing. Strange to say, places that have seemed quiet and harmless, even dingy, during the daytime, bloom out into gambling dens, where the rattling of dice and the rolling of billiard balls make deadly music through the night. How often some haggard form, hunted by ruin and despair, slips like a shadow from these lighted halls; a pistol-shot, a groan, and he vanishes into a darker night, “where never more the sun shall rise or set.” There are no laws against gambling; they are a free people here, and are allowed to choose each his own road to ruin, consequently gambling is carried on to a frightful extent, and by all kinds and conditions of men. It seems indigenous to the soil, for while men stake houses and lands, nay, the very last coin from their pockets, the very children gamble over their tops and marbles or dirt pies in the gutter.
The inhabitants of New Orleans are never tired of expatiating on the beauties of their city, and dilating on the golden history of its romantic past, or the prosperous record of its present day. Their devotion further insists on the general healthiness of its climate; they admit there are occasional epidemics, but then at certain seasons epidemics rage everywhere, they are not specially improvised for New Orleans, and the black population suffers always more than the white.
Lovely though it be--a most quaint, picturesque old city, with its bright skies and gorgeous growth of tropical flowers--no sane person could have faith in its sanitary perfections. A beautiful human nest it is; low-lying, as in a hole scooped out of the solid earth, many feet below the waters of the Mississippi, partially surrounded by swamps of the rankest kind, and girdled by silver streams and deep flowing rivers, it must necessarily be the favourite resort of the malarial fiend. Here that scourge of the South, the yellow fever, too, rising from sweltering earth, sends forth his scorching, blighting breath, and clothes the land in mourning. But every man clings to his own soil; no matter whether it brings forth thorns or roses, he is satisfied with the gathering thereof.