Arrived at New Orleans, M. Marmier makes his moan over the fair and broad territories once possessed by France in the Western Hemisphere, and predicts the loss of nearly all that she still retains in those latitudes, the Islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique, as a natural consequence of that decree of the Provisional Government which liberated, at one blow, the whole of the blacks, thereby ruining the white proprietors. The slaves had cost three or four thousand francs a-piece; four hundred francs was the indemnity granted to their owners. The negroes, thus suddenly emancipated, at once took to idleness, and would work only when they pleased, and as they pleased, and on their own terms. The sugar-fields were deserted, and the Creoles, abandoning their plantations, worthless for want of hands to cultivate them, were emigrating in numbers to the United States. M. Marmier met a great many of these unfortunate men, ruined and exiled by the mad precipitation of one of the most worthless and despicable Governments that ever swayed, even for a brief space, the destinies of a great country and its colonies. "Some day," he says, "the negroes will no longer be satisfied to receive wages. With the ideas of equality preached to them by their apostles, they will grow indignant at their condition of hired labourers. They will desire to possess lands. The sooner to have them, they will seize them by force. All the emigrants from Guadaloupe and Martinique with whom I conversed respecting the present condition of the two islands, foresaw a bloody and terrible catastrophe. Failing energetic repression, those islands, like that of St Domingo, will be lost to us. But we shall have the satisfaction, perhaps, of witnessing the foundation of a new kingdom of blacks, and of manufacturing at Paris the crown and sceptre of another Faustin I." Such gloomy accounts of their condition and prospects were not calculated to encourage M. Marmier in any design he may have entertained of a visit to the French West-Indian colonies. He preferred Cuba--previously, however, abiding some days in New Orleans, where, as in Canada, he fondly traced the lingering habits and traditions of his native land. The gay, urbane, and sociable Creoles contrasted most favourably with the dry, taciturn, tobacco-chewing men of business of the Northern States. M. Marmier was no less surprised than pleased at the striking difference, having expected to find the people of New Orleans already "vitrified by the American furnace."