THE NEW ORLEANS EXPOSITION. 591 



oaks, retained their green foliage, otherwise all the trees were as bare of leaves 

 and the grass as dead as in the North. 



Cotton fields here and there, half picked, broke the monotony of dense 

 forests and canebrakes ; farm houses and cabins showed themselves at long inter- 

 vals ; towns and villages were almost unknown ; the railway stations were mostly 

 single shanties without even the accompaniment of the universal saloons and eat- 

 ing houses ; animal life was scarce, and as for people, it was a wonder, as one of 

 our professors said, where the South, if this was a sample of it, found the men to 

 make the resistance it did to the march of our armies in the late war. The 

 morning of our arrival in New Orleans found us amid sugar plantations, orange 

 groves, blooming roses, well advanced gardens, barefooted negroes and other 

 signs of a tropical climate. The weather was warm, but the air was moist and 

 murky. 



About 9:00 o'clock we rolled into the city, passing over miles of low, flat, 

 swampy outskirts with grassy streets cut into miry channels by the teams plung- 

 ing through them. On the right we could see the Exposition buildings in the 

 distance, with the chimneys and even the hulls of the steamers on the river be- 

 yond looming up high above the intermediate territory. On the left more swamps 

 with palmettoes, moss-burdened oaks and cypresses, and tangled vines, extend- 

 ing clear to the margin of Lake Ponchartrain, In front, mud, smoke, white 

 frame houses with enormous double porticoes, negroes, oranges, bananas, French 

 women, blooming dooryards with high close fences, and ditches full of filthy 

 water, made up the landscape. At the depot we took carriages and omnibuses 

 and were jolted to our hotel over the roughest streets imaginable. If any one of 

 our readers was ever sick while in the army and compelled to ride in a government 

 wagon over the corduroy roads of Virginia, he will have a pretty good idea of 

 this closing ride, otherwise he cannot, .as nothing else ever equaled it for dis- 

 comfort. The paving of the streets, where any has been done, consists of blocks 

 of stone of uneven sizes and shapes, with — apparently — an omission of every 

 other one. 



While growUng, I may as well say that if disease really does ever come from 

 dirt there should not be a well knewii person in New Orleans at present, for it is 

 impossible to conceive of streets more utterly foul and filthy. Not only is there 

 an unmeasureable vastness of mud, hardly barred off from the sidewalks by the 

 curbstones, and swashed along sluggishly by the oozy torrents in the gutters, but 

 every butcher, baker, saloon-keeper, etc., who has a bucket of slops to dispose 

 of brings it to the edge of the sidewalk and pitches it into the middle of the street. 

 You have mud in Kansas City, but it is so clean compared with New Orleans mud 

 that you could absolutely cleanse yourself in it after wading about in the latter 

 for an hour or two. Inasmuch as I learn that this city is quite healthy now, I 

 am prepared to discard the theory that dirt h£.s anything to do with originating 

 disease, and propose to protest against our Dr. Fee's sanitary precautions as un- 

 necessary and possibly baneful. 



Having said so much in disparagement of this cityj I will now say something 



