CHAP. XXVIII.] YELLOW FEVER. 127 



CHAP. XXVIII. 



Negroes not Attached by Yellow Fever. History of Mr. Wilde s 

 Poem. The Market, New Orleans. Motley Character of 

 Population. Levee and Steamers. First Sight of Mississippi 

 River. View from the Cupola of the St. Charles. Site of 

 New Orleans. Excursion to Lake Pontchartrain. Shell 

 Road. Heaps of Gnathodon. Excavation for Gas- Works. 

 Buried Upright Trees. Pere Antoine s Date-palm. 



BEFORE we left New Orleans Mr. Wilde received a 

 message from his negroes, whom he had left behind 

 at Augusta, in Georgia, entreating him to send for 

 them. They had felt, it seems, somewhat hurt and 

 slighted at not having been sooner permitted to join 

 him. He told us that he was only waiting for a 

 favourable season to transplant them, for he feared 

 that men of colour, when they had been acclimatised 

 for several generations in so cool a country as the 

 upper parts of Alabama and Georgia, might run 

 great risk of the yellow fever, although the medical 

 men here assured him that a slight admixture of 

 negro blood sufficed to make them proof against this 

 scourge. 



&quot; No one,&quot; he said, &quot; feels safe here, who has not 

 survived an attack of the fever, or escaped unharmed 

 while it has been raging.&quot; He mentioned the belief 

 of some theorists, that the complaint was caused by 

 invisible animalcules, a notion agreeing singularly 



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