51 
to have an eye over their clerks, and also to observe what me¬ 
chanics, or other small tradesmen, played here, to stop giving 
credit to such as haunted the resorts of these gentry. I was taken 
to two of these gambling-houses, which are united with coffee¬ 
houses, to see how they were conducted. In one of them were 
two roulette tables, in two separate rooms, in the other, which 
was smaller, one roulette and one pharo table. There was betted 
here silver and paper, but not more than twenty dollars bank 
notes, and most of them did not bet more than a dollar a time. 
A couple of young fellows lost all that they had, and behaved 
very indecently when they were stripped of their money. Se¬ 
veral of the better sort appeared to be country people, who had 
brought their corn and cotton to market, and only played off their 
profits. At one of the tables sat some common sailors, half drunk. 
We found rather low company collected in ffoth houses, and our 
curiosity was soon satisfied. It is to be hoped, that the legisla¬ 
ture of Alabama will prohibit such houses. They are, on the 
whole, very good places for recruiting the army and navy! 
CHAPTER XIX. 
Journey to New Orleans , and Residence in that City. 
ON the 18th of January, we embarked in the schooner Em¬ 
blem, whose cabin was proportioned to her tonnage, (which was 
but fifty tons,) but comfortably high, and well ornamented. The 
sides were of mahogany and maple; on each side were two state¬ 
rooms, with two births each; the back part of the cabin, being 
something higher than the forward part, contained a birth on each 
side. Of these, the starboard was occupied by Mr. Bowdoin, 
the other by myself. 
The shores of Mobile Bay, which is very wide, are low and 
overgrown with wood, before us lay a long island, called Isle 
Dauphine, by the unfortunate Delasalle, who discovered it. Mo¬ 
bile point lies to the left, where, after sunset, we beheld the light 
in the light-house. There stood on this point in the late war a 
small fort, called Fort Bowyer, which the present Lieutenant- 
Colonel, then Major Lawrence, gallantly defended, with a garri¬ 
son of one hundred and thirty men, against eight hundred dis¬ 
embarked English sailors and Seminole Indians, under Major 
Nichols. The assailants were defeated, after their ordnance was 
dismounted, with considerable loss, and the English corvette 
