CHAPTER VIII. NEW ORLEANS BIENVILLE AND THE CITY OF THE PAST.-- FRENCH AND SPANISH RULE IN THE NEW WORLD.-- LOUISIANA CEDED TO THE UNITED STATES.-- CAPTAIN EADS AND HIS JETTIES.-- TRANSPORTATION OF CEREALS TO EUROPE.-- CHARLES MORGAN.- - CREOLE TYPES OF CITIZENS.-- LEVEES AND CRAWFISH.-- DRAINAGE OF THE CITY INTO LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. THIS was my fifth visit to New Orleans, and walking through its quaint streets I observed many changes of an undesirable nature, the inevitable consequences of political misrule. As the past of the city loomed up before me, the various scenes of bloodshed, crime, and misery enacted, shifted like pictures in a panorama before my mind's eye. I saw far back in the distance an indomitable man, faint and discouraged, after the terrible sufferings of a winter at a bleak fort in the wilderness, drag his weary limbs to the spot where New Orleans now stands, and defiantly unfurling the flag of France, determined to establish the capital of Louisiana on the treacherous banks of the Mississippi. Such was Bienville, the hardy son of a Canadian father. A little later we have the New Orleans of 1723. It is a low swamp, overgrown with ragged forests, and cut up into a thousand islands by ruts and pools of stagnant water. There is a small cleared space along the river's channel but even this being only partly reclaimed from the surrounding marsh, is often inundated. It is cut up into square patches, round each of which runs a ditch of black mud and refuse, which, lying exposed to the rays of an almost tropical sun, sends forth unwholesome odors, and invites pestilence. There is a palisade around the city, and a great moat; and here, with the tall, green grasses growing up to their humble doors, live graceful ladies and noble gentlemen, representatives of that nation so famed for finesse of manner and stately grace. It is an odd picture this rough doorway, surrounded with reeds and swamps, mud and misery, and crowned with the beauty of a fair French maiden, who steps daintily, with Parisian ease, upon the highway of the new world. She is not, however, alone in her exile. Along the banks of the Mississippi, for miles beyond the city, stretch the fertile plantations of the representatives of aristocratic French families. The rich lands are worked by negro slaves, who, fresh from the African coast, walk erect before their masters, being strangers to the abject, crouching gait which a century of slavery afterwards imposes upon them. No worship save the Catholic is allowed, and to remind the people of their duty wooden crosses are erected on every side.