Sallying from our hotel, we crossed to the head of Chartres-street, and threaded our way among the busy multitude, who, moving in all directions, on business or pleasure, thronged its well-paved side-walks. On both sides of the way, for several squares, the buildings were chiefly occupied by wholesale and retail dry goods dealers, who are mostly northerners; so that a Yankee stranger feels himself quite at home among them; but before he reaches the end of the long, narrow street, he might imagine himself again a stranger, in a city of France. The variety of the streets, here, is almost as great as the diversity of character among the people. New-Orleans seems to have been built by a universal subscription, to which every European nation has contributed a street, as it certainly has citizens. From one, which to a Bostonian looks like an old acquaintance, you turn suddenly into another that reminds you of Marseilles. Here a street lined with long, narrow, grated windows, in dingy, massive buildings, surrounded by Moorish turrets, urns, grotesque ornaments of grayish stone and motley arabesque, would bring back to the exiled Castilian the memory of his beloved Madrid. In traversing the next, a Parisian might forget that the broad Atlantic rolled between him and the boasted city of his nativity. Here is one that seems to have been transplanted from the very midst of Naples; while its interesting neighbour reminds one of the quaker-like plainness of Philadelphia. There are not, it is true, many which possess decidedly an individual character; for some of them contain such a heterogeneous congregation of buildings, that one cannot but imagine their occupants, in emigrating from every land under heaven, to have brought their own houses with them. The most usual style of building at present, is after the Boston school--if I may so term the fashion of the plain, solid, handsome brick and granite edifices, which are in progress here, as well as in every other city in the union; a style of architecture which owes its origin to the substantial good taste of the citizens of the goodly "city of notions." The majority of structures in the old, or French section of New-Orleans, are after the Spanish and French orders. This style of building is not only permanent and handsome, but peculiarly adapted, with its cool, paved courts, lofty ceilings, and spacious windows, to this sultry climate; and I regret that it is going rapidly out of fashion. Dwellings of this construction have, running through their centre, a broad, high-arched passage, with huge folding-doors, or gates, leading from the street to a paved court in the rear, which is usually surrounded by the sleeping-rooms and offices, communicating with each other by galleries running down the whole square. In the centre of this court usually stands a cistern, and placed around it, in large vases, are flowers and plants of every description. In their love for flowers, the Creoles are truly and especially French. The glimpses one has now and then, in passing through the streets, and by the ever-open doors of the Creoles' residences, of brilliant flowers and luxuriantly blooming exotics, are delightfully refreshing, and almost sufficient to tempt one to a "petit larceny." You may know the residence of a Creole here, even if he resides in a Yankee building, by his mosaic-paved court-yard, filled with vases of flowers.