Omnibuses and cars of all description are in waiting at the station, and in a very short time we are driving through the up and down streets of this quaint old city to the Hotel St. Charles, where we take our rest. CHAPTER XVII. New Orleans, “The Paris of the South.”--French quarters.--Tropical street scene.--To Carrolton.--The Levées.--Classical architecture.--A coloured funeral.--The dismal swamp.--Lake Ponchartrain.--A gambling population. The Hotel St. Charles is a very fine impressive building in the centre of the city of New Orleans. It is of white stone, and the simple colonnaded front, with its tall straight fluted columns, gives it quite a classical appearance. It is the best hotel in the town, but it might be better; it has spacious corridors, and handsomely furnished rooms, but the cuisine is not so good as it should be in an hotel of such pretensions, the table is poorly served, and it is wanting in that liberality which is characteristic of the South. The service is very scanty; one servant seems to have to do the work of six. Our waiter was a simple biped--a mere man, when he ought to have had as many arms and legs as a devil fish; he had need of them, he was always wanted here, there, and everywhere, and seemed to flash about on invisible telegraph wires. We start in the early morning on a pedestrian excursion through this “Paris of the South.” We almost fancy that we have gone to sleep in the new world, and woke up in the old fair and familiar city across the sea. It is the same, yet not the same; there is a similarity in the general features, especially in the vicinity of Canal Street, to which I shall allude more fully by and by, and an insouciant gaiety in the aspect of the people, which pervades the very air they breathe; an electric current seems always playing upon their spirits, moving their emotional nature, sometimes to laughter, sometimes to tears. It seems as though the two cities had been built on the same model, only differently draped and garnished, decorated with different orders, and stamped with a different die. Coming down a narrow lane, we met a typical old Frenchwoman, her mahogany coloured face scored like the bark of an old tree scarcely visible beneath her flapping sun-bonnet. She wore short petticoats, and came clattering along over the rough stones in her wooden sabots, while her tall blue-bloused grandson carrying her well-filled basket strode beside her; and a meek eyed sister of charity bent on her errand of mercy passed in at a creaking doorway. These were the only signs of life we saw as we first turned on our way to the French quarter of the town, which still bears the impress of the old colonial days. This is the most ancient portion of the city, and full of romantic traditions of the days that are dead and gone. The long, narrow, crooked streets, running on all sides in a spidery fashion, with rows of shabby-looking houses, remain exactly as they were a hundred