This is a subject on which the Americans themselves are very tolerant and easily satisfied. ‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me, on the top of Wells and Fargo’s coach, as we were passing over the Plains to Denver, ‘Sir, this is the finest piece of road in the world.’ As nothing had been said previously about roads, and as what we were passing along was merely a freight-track on the dry prairie, four inches deep in dust and sand and earth in fine weather, and as many or more inches deep in mud in wet weather, I intimated that I believed I had not heard rightly his remark. He then repeated his assertion even more emphatically than at first, ‘that it was the best piece of road in the world.’ I was beginning to explain to him, as courteously as I could, why I should hardly have ventured to call it a road at all, when he stopped me short with, ‘Sir, we have no faith in European practices. I am a judge of roads. I have seen all kinds of roads; and I have seen roads in all kinds of places; and this is just what I said it was, the finest piece of road in the world.’ Over this model road, sometimes with six good horses, never with less than four, we were able to manage about six miles an hour. The railroad from New Orleans, for the first mile or two, lies through a most dreary dismal swamp. The water stands everywhere. The palmetto and the swamp cedar grow out of the water. The trees are completely shrouded with the grey Spanish moss. The trees and the moss look as if they had long been dead. One who enters the city by this approach (had ever any other great city such an approach?) must carry with him some not very encouraging thoughts. Whenever in the summer or autumn the wind blows from this direction, I suppose it will remind him of the yellow fever, the horrible scourge of the place. [Sidenote: _A Prayer for a Brother Minister._] The swamp I just mentioned is succeeded by sugar plantations, the costly machinery of which had been destroyed during the war. They now appeared to be used as grazing farms for cattle brought up from Texas. On one of these ruined plantations I saw some hedges of the Cherokee rose. This is an evergreen, and makes too wide a hedge, though its height may be an advantage in that climate. It is a common opinion in New Orleans that all these sugar plantations will eventually be re-established; but that this will never be done by the present proprietors, who are all ruined, and who will have to sell the land at a merely nominal price, which is all that the land without the machinery is worth. Those who will buy the land will be companies, or Northern men who will have capital enough to purchase new machinery, and to pay the heavy costs of carrying on the cultivation of the cane and manufacture of the sugar.