sheltering a population of servants and clients large as that comprised in the Roman _familia_, are now for the most part in a state of decay. There is much crumbling of wood-work, looseness of jointing, ulcerous exposure of the brick skeleton where plaster has rotted away in patches from piazza pillars and from the ribs of archways. Grass struggles up between the flagging; microscopic fungi patch the wall surfaces with sickly green. The semi-tropical forces of nature in the South are mighty to destroy the work of man. Dismally romantic is the Greek front upon Toulouse Street, in rear of the old Hôtel Saint Louis, and once famous as 'The Planters' Bank.' Through cracks in the high board fence erected about its desolation one may see the weeds squeezing their way through the joints of its broad stone steps, the green creepers wriggling round its columns, and bushes actually growing from the angles of its pediment--a vegetation planted, doubtless, by birds. This ruin has a veritable classic dignity--a melancholy that is antique. Sorrowful likewise are the voiceless courts of the once beautiful French hotel, with their void galleries above and dried-up fountains below. Millions upon millions have changed hands within that building; princely revels were held there of old by the feudal lords of Louisiana; the splendors of the past linger in the tarnished gilding and dying colors of the lofty apartments, and in the decorations of the porcelain dome frescoed by Casanova. Many of the French and Spanish dwellings are as full of architectural mysteries and surprises as the Castle of Otranto--corridors that serpentine, stairways that leap from building to building, cabinets masked in the recesses of dormer-windows, curious covered bridges worthy of Venice. Looking up or down one of these streets, the eye is astonished by the long patch-work of colors motley as Joseph's coat, ultimately fading off into grayish-blues where the vista meets the horizon. Under the golden glow of the sun these tints take delightful warmth; there are chrome and gamboge yellows, deep-sea greens, ashen pinks, brick reds, chocolates, azures, blazing whites, all trimmed with the intenser green of iron balconies and the antiquated window-shutters folded back against the wall. The old French Opera-house I have seen painted in a peculiarly pleasing hue, to which a summer sun would lend the mellowness of antique marble. It was a ripe-ivorine tint, with just the faintest conceivable flush of pink; it was a warm and human color--it was the color of creole flesh!