Along the levees were many ocean liners loading with molasses, sugar and cotton, chiefly cotton, in which there is an enormous and constantly increasing trade. The biggest ships now come up right alongside the wooden wharves of the levees, and for several miles lie there bow to stern.
The theatres and business blocks, the customhouse, and city hall and other public buildings of New Orleans are none of them modern, but appear to have been built long years ago, yet, notwithstanding their marks of antiquity, the business part of the city is animate with stir and action. There is hope in men’s faces in New Orleans, and the younger men are finding in the city’s waxing commerce opportunity for achievement which their forefathers never knew. With the completion of the Panama Canal, New Orleans will become one of the greatest of commercial ports.
[Illustration: ALONG THE LEVEE--NEW ORLEANS]
From New Orleans I shall go via the Southern Pacific Railway, crossing the Mississippi and traveling westward through Louisiana and Texas to San Antonio, Texas, and then I shall go south into Mexico.
(Written on the train and mailed at Laredo, Texas.) _November 16th_.
The journey from New Orleans was somewhat tedious, but yet so crowded with new sights that the time passed quite too quickly for me even to glance at the copy of Lew Wallace’s _Fair God_, which I had bought in New Orleans for reading on the way.
At 9:45 A. M. I left the Hotel St. Charles and took the ’bus for the Southern Pacific Station, which is a shabby, weatherworn wooden building down by the water side, in the French quarter of the city. A large, ill-kept waiting room was crowded with emigrants--chiefly “crackers” and “po’ white trash” from the cotton states. A wide gangway led to the clumsy puffing ferryboat which took us across the Mississippi to a series of long, low, wooden sheds where our transcontinental train awaited us.
The ferry crosses the Mississippi from near the center of the bow, where the river sweeps in a giant curve against the crescent shore. The current is swift, and whether the waters be high or low, the river always hurries on with relentless eagerness toward the Gulf of Mexico, one hundred miles away.