Chapter 44

Chapter 44
City Sights

THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--
bears no resemblance to the American end of the city:
the American end which lies beyond the intervening
brick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks;
are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern,
with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect;
all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long,
iron-railed verandas running along the several stories.
Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain
with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster.
It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural
a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds.
This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated;
neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.

The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is often
exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large
cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling,
intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made,
and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable.
They are become BRIC-A-BRAC.

The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient
quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius,
the author of 'the Grandissimes.' In him the South has found
a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.
In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and
vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it,
more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal
contact with it.

With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate,
a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vivid
sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling;
you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them
imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were,
of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons
of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.

We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices.
There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it
as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever
been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact.
It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy
of Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by
the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles.
The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole-bouquets on the