CHAPTER XXVIII. 



Negroes not Attacked 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 Pontchar- 

 train. 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, some 

 what hurt and slighted at not having been sooner permitted to 

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

 season to transplant them, for he feared that men of color, when 

 they had been acclimatized 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 as 

 sured 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 rag 

 ing.&quot; He mentioned the belief of some theorists, that the com 

 plaint was caused by invisible animalcules, a notion agreeing sin 

 gularly with that of many Romans in regard to the malaria of 

 Italy. 



The year following this conversation, our excellent friend was 

 himself carried off by this fatal disease. He is well known to 

 the literary world as the author of a work on the &quot; Love and 

 Madness of Tasso,&quot; published in 1842, and perhaps still more 

 generally by some beautiful lines, beginning &quot; My life is like the 

 summer rose,&quot; which are usually supposed to have derived their 

 tone of touching melancholy, from his grief at the sudden death 

 of a brother, and soon after of a mother, who never recovered the 

 shock of her son s death. As there had been so much contro- 



