A call by the members of the New Orleans bar in a body, to pay their respects to the Chief Justice, gave one an opportunity not often afforded to see the lawyers of this leading city together. They were a fine-looking body of men, mostly of marked Southern accent and manner, very courteous, and, on the whole, impressing a stranger as of much more than ordinary ability. Many of them were by no means as loyal as they might be; and a few were in sore trouble about the test oath, which prevented their practicing in the United States Court. * * * * * In the evening we were taken to a fair held by the Catholic negroes—mostly of the old Louisiana free-negro stock. By one of the curious revenges of these avenging times, the fair was held in the elegant residence of no less a person than ex-Senator and ex-Minister Pierre Soulé. He who had so often demonstrated negro inferiority and the rightfulness of slavery was now an exile, seeking a precarious livelihood by the practice of the law in a foreign language, in the City of Mexico; while the inferior negroes were selling ice-cream from his tables and raffling fancy articles in his spacious parlors, for the benefit of the slave children’s schools! Nowhere else in the world could that scene have been witnessed. There were elegantly dressed ladies, beautiful with a beauty beside which that of the North is wax-work; with great, swimming, lustrous eyes, half-veiled behind long, pendent lashes, and arched with coal-black eyebrows; complexions no darker than those of the Spanish senoritas one admires in Havana, but transparent as that of the most beautiful Northern blonde, with the rich blood coming and going, under the olive skin, with every varying emotion; luxuriant flowing tresses, graceful figures, accomplished manners—perfect Georgian or Circassian beauties. Yet every one of these was “only a nigger.” Many of them had been educated in Paris, and more than one Parisian wardrobe shimmered that evening under the radiance of Mr. Pierre Soulé’s chandeliers. Some of them were wealthy; all were intelligent, and some conversed in the foreign tongue in which they addressed us, with a vivacity and grace not often surpassed in Washington ball-rooms. But they were only niggers. They might be presented to the Empress Eugenie; they might aspire to the loftiest connections in Europe; but they were not fit to appear in a white man’s house in New Orleans, and the Chief Justice was eternally disgraced (according to the talk of the city next day), for having so forgotten dignity, and even decency, as to enter a parlor filled with niggers that were trying to play lady and gentleman!