Years have gone by since those brave days. The scenes that so stirred not only Montgomery but the entire land have passed into the pages of history. The eager throng that crowded Capitol Hill, and hung breathlessly on every word of the brief inaugural address; the ringing cheers and the roar of cannon that welcomed the news of Virginia’s secession; the groups of leaders planning earnestly laws and constitutions and deep schemes of public policy; the soldiers in gray marching by with high hopes and light step; the sad day when the Confederate Government packed its archives and took its departure for Richmond--these memories and a thousand others that cluster about them will always be kept alive by the tender sentiment that clings to the Lost Cause. But Montgomery, true to the spirit of its history, does not look backward. Business enterprise has adapted itself to new surroundings. It is to-day a city of the New South. On the site of the old Indian town, Ecunchatty, stands a great modern factory. The change is typical. Far over the wide stretches of field and river float the long streamers of smoke, the banners of the modern army of industry, in striking but friendly contrast to the white dome on Capitol Hill, the centre of Montgomery’s past and present political life. [Illustration] [Illustration] NEW ORLEANS “THE CRESCENT CITY” BY GRACE KING Sail across the blue waters of the Gulf and make your way up the mighty current of the Mississippi, like the leisurely traveler of yore, if you wish to approach New Orleans in the proper way and spirit; unless--which also furnishes a proper way and spirit--you wind your way down the mighty current, from some far northern starting-point. And for guidance provide not yourself with an up-to-date map of the United States, crisscrossed with railroads, and speckled with illegibly printed names of swarming towns. The pilot chart of the steamboat is the true informant here if you are not the fortunate possessor or borrower of some old print of the last century, one of those happy combinations of fact and imagination issued by the ancient cartographer in the effort to compromise old theories with new discoveries; charts tracked by the foot of the pioneer, not by the wheel of the locomotive, graded by the paddle of the canoe, not by that of the steamer; charts that bear record to the history as well as geography of a country and chronicle its ever-clearer and ever-increasing vastness and importance. Upon such a map was the name New Orleans first written down. Naught to the north but Canada and the Great Lakes; to the east, the Atlantic seaboard with its mere fringe of English settlements fenced in by impassable mountains; to the west, mountains again, and illimitable prairies, covered over by bounding buffalo. South, lay the Gulf of Mexico with Florida on the one side, Mexico on the other. From one of the Great Lakes at the north, Lake Michigan, to the Gulf of Mexico