"It is funny," you begin, "that New Orleans should make so much of the Boston Club, when Butler came from--"
It is not funny. You saw the Boston Club which vies for social supremacy in the old French city with the Pickwick Club, there in Canal street, at least you saw its fine old white house in that broad thoroughfare. It is not funny. Your New Orleans man tells you--courteously but clearly.
"We named our club from that game," he says.
"Boston was a fine game, sir," he adds. "And that without ever a thought of that town up in Massachusetts."
From a carnival to a graveyard is a far cry indeed, and yet the cemeteries of New Orleans are as distinctive of her as her Mardi Gras festivities. We have spoken of the river and the great part it has played in the history of the city that rests so close to its treacherous shore. And it is that very treacherous shore that makes it so exceedingly difficult to arrange a cemetery in the soft and marshy soil on which the city is built.
So it is that the New Orleans' cemeteries are veritable cities of the dead. For the bodies that are buried within them are placed above the ground, not under them. Tombs and mausoleums are the rule, not the exception, and where a family is not prosperous enough to own even the simplest of tombs, it will probably join with other families or with some association in the ownership of a house in the city of the dead. And for those who have not even this opportunity there are the ovens.
The ovens are built in the great walls that encompass the older cemeteries and make them seem like crumbling fortresses. Four tiers high, each oven large enough to accommodate a coffin--the sealed fronts bear the epitaphs of those who have known the New Orleans of other days. A motley company they are--poets, pirates, judges, planters, soldiers, priests--around them the scarred regiments of those who lived their lives without the haunting touch of Fame upon the shoulder--no one will even venture a guess as to the number that have been laid away within a single one of these cities.
And when you are done with seeing the graves of Jean Lafitte or Dominique You--why is it that the average mind pricks up with a more quickened interest at the tomb of a pirate than at a preacher--the Portuguese sexton begins plucking at the loosely laid bricks of one of these abandoned ovens. Abandoned? He lifts out a skull, this twentieth century Yorick and bids you peep through the aperture. Like the _concierge_ of the old hotel, looking is made more easy from a blazing folding copy of the morning _Picayune_. In the place are seemingly countless skulls, with lesser bones.