New Orleans burgeons with the season. The broad fair avenues, the wide boulevards, famed Canal street, are luxuriant with spring life and drapery. Dashing equipages glance down the Shell Road with merry driving-and picnic-parties. There is boating on the lake, and delicious French collations at pleasant resorts, spread by neat-handed mulatto waiters speaking a patois of French, English and negro. There spring meats and sauces and light French wines allure to enjoyments less sensual than the coarser Northern climate affords. The unrivaled French opera is in season, the forcing house of that bright garden of exotics. Other and Northern cities boast of such entertainments, but I apprehend they resemble the Simon-Pure much as an Englishman's French resembles the native tongue. In New Orleans it is the natural, full-flavored article, lively with French taste and talent, and for a people instinct with a truer Gallic spirit, perhaps, than that of Paris itself. It is antique and colonial, but age and the sea-voyage have preserved more distinctly the native _bouquet_ of the wine after all grosser flavors have wasted away. The spectacle within the theatre on a fine night is brilliant, recherché and French. From side-scene to dome, and from gallery after gallery to the gay parquette, glitters the bright, shining audience. There are loungers, American and French, blasé and roué, who in the intervals drink brandy and whisky, or anisette, maraschino, curçoa or some other fiery French cordial. The French loungers are gesticulatory, and shoulders, arms, fingers, eyes and eyebrows help out the tongue's rapid utterance; but they are never rude or boisterous. There are belles, pretty French belles, with just a tint of deceitless rouge for fashion's sake, and tinkling, crisp, low French voices modulated to chime with the music and not disharmonize it; nay, rather add to the sweetness of its concord.