The public buildings, state offices, and churches, are remarkably fine architectural features of the city. There is no need to describe them here, for the written description of one church, unless indeed there is some special history connected therewith, sounds much the same as another; and any visitor to the city can get an excellent guide thereto and familiarise himself with their appearance so far as he desires, and some are interesting enough to repay him for his trouble. There is one very favourite excursion, largely patronised by the inhabitants of the city on warm summer evenings, and one which the most casual tourist should not fail to take. We enter the little railway train in Canal Street, the very heart of the city, and steaming leisurely along we soon reach the outskirts, and run through pretty woodland scenery, with dainty dwellings scattered here and there among the full-foliaged trees. Presently we come upon a long stretch of open country; on one side is the canal, with a wide roadway and spacious tracts of cultivated lands beyond it. On the other side of the railway track, on our right, there runs a similar carriage road and footway running along the edge of a luxuriant thicket of green low-lying bushes, which seem like the ragged fringe of the virgin forest; then there rises clusters of slight willowy slips; a part of the pristine family of oaks and alders which have grown and developed into gigantic trees, thickening and twining their long arms together till they form an impenetrable mass of green, but instead of a bit of forest primeval, we are told that this is a most dismal swamp of many miles extent, utterly impassable for either man or beast, and varying from two to eight or ten feet deep, the abode of repulsive reptiles and other obnoxious creatures. They say that it is no uncommon thing at certain seasons of the year for a huge black or green snake to wriggle out of its home of slush and slime and coil itself up on the pathway, or an alligator will sometimes be found stretched along the railway track, its lidless eyes staring stupidly at the sun. The whole of this part of New Orleans has been reclaimed from these extensive swamps, and no doubt, if the necessity should arise, the whole ground may be reclaimed and cultivated or built over; but such a proceeding could only be carried out at an almost fabulous expense, and as the great lungs of the city have plenty of breathing room in other directions, it will no doubt be left, for this century at least, in the occupation of noisome reptiles, the refuse of God’s creatures.