One crisp wintry afternoon late in the month of January, 1899, having bade adieu to a party of boon companions at a little railway station in the Blue Ridge mountains of Pennsylvania, I ensconced myself on the cushions of the smoking-compartment of the Black Diamond Express, lit a cigar, and ran through the pages of a popular magazine, possessed with a feeling of satisfaction that my destination, New Orleans, lay under the warmth of Southern skies, free from the bleak winds of the North, and with that suavity manifest in a person whose most arduous responsibilities are those of pleasure seeking and curious notions. Though having touched both Florida and Texas, I had never been as far south as the crescent city at the mouth of the Mississippi, so that on this trip it was my object to appease an insatiable desire by thoroughly acquainting myself with the natural and historical charms of this quaint old Southern city, and particularly witness the festivities of the Mardi Gras. In picturing New Orleans in phantasm, I had always had a conception of a beautiful city of Spanish architecture, dotted with churches and cathedrals whose chimes pealed sweetly overhead, and along whose flagstone streets the beautiful Creole belles vied in angelic accord with their more dusky sisters, the quadroons; darkies rolling cotton bales on the levee, their negro melodies interspersed with the deep sonorous steam-boat whistles on the wide-spreading river; haunts of the vendetta and the mafia; southern homes shaded by palmetto, whose confines exhaled in fragrant quintessence the aroma of magnolia; dusky “Dinahs” in red bandannas picking cotton, as the old negroes thrummed the banjoes near the cabin where the pickaninnies played around the door. These were my early impressions of the gulf-cities of “Dixie-land,” and how many are there who have seen the dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or read George W. Cable’s stories of the Creoles of Louisiana, who have not pictured just such scenes as these? On my arrival at Washington, D. C., the sun shone bright in southern warmth, in combative contrast to the bleak sweeping winds of the north, and, having ample time in which to reach New Orleans before the beginning of the Mardi Gras season (St. Valentine’s Day), I decided to see some of the points of interest overlooked on previous visits to the capital. One in particular was the trip to the tomb of General Washington, at Mount Vernon, a short but very beautiful ride by steam-boat on the Potomac River.