We alight at the railway terminus, at the foot of the levées, the Mecca of our morning pilgrimage. We ascend a dozen cranky steps, and stand on the top of the levée, with the coffee-coloured flood of the great Mississippi rolling at our feet, and look back upon the low-lying city behind us. This king of rivers is here wide and winding, but drowsy and sluggish; its vast waters rolling down from the north seem to languish here in the indolence of the South; it stretches its slow length along, like a sleeping giant with all its wondrous strength and power hushed beneath the summer sun. The levées form a delightfully cool promenade, and are thronged with people on summer evenings. Cosy benches shaded by wide spreading green trees are placed at certain distances, and glancing across the broad brown lazy river to the opposite side the view is picturesque in the extreme. The architectural beauty of New Orleans is unique, and wholly unlike any other Southern city; the avenues are wide and beautifully planted, a generous leafy shade spreads every way you turn. The dwelling houses which line St. Charles’s Avenue are graceful, classical structures; there are no Brummagem gingerbread buildings, no blending together of ancient and modern ideas, and running wild into fancy chimney-pots, arches, points, and angles like a twelfth-cake ornament. Some are fashioned like Greek temples, most impressive in their chaste outline and simplicity of form; others straight and square, with tall Corinthian columns or fluted pillars, sometimes of marble, sometimes of stone. The severe architectural simplicity, the pure white buildings shaded by beautiful magnolias and surrounded by brilliant shrubs and flowers, form a vista charming to the eye and soothing to the senses, and all stands silhouetted against the brightest of blue skies--a blue before which the bluest of Italian skies would seem pale. The aspect of the city changes on every side; we leave the fashionable residential regions, and enter broad avenues lined with grand old forest trees, sometimes in double rows, the thick leaved branches meeting and forming a canopy overhead. The ground is carpeted with soft green turf, and bare-legged urchins, black and white, are playing merry games; a broken down horse is quietly grazing, and a cow is being milked under the trees, while a company of pretty white goats, with a fierce looking Billie at their head, are careering about close by. Pretty pastoral bits of landscape on every side cling to the skirts, and fringe the sides of this quaint city. As we get farther away from St. Charles’s Avenue the better class of residences grow fewer and fewer, till they cease altogether, and we come upon pretty green-shuttered cottages, with their porches covered with blossoms, and rows of the old-fashioned straw beehives in front. Here and there are tall tenement houses built of cherry-red bricks, which are let out in flats to the labouring classes.