New Orleans seemed familiar to me; I thought I could remember whole streets there that I had passed through, as a little child, clinging to the hand of my father--himself an emigrant, and looking on all the strange things around him with as much wonder as the two little girls he was leading through the town. How it came back to me! the slave-market, and the bright-faced mulatto girl, hardly bigger than myself, who so begged of my father to buy her and take her home with him, so that she could play with and wait on us. There was nothing shocking to me, I regret to say, in seeing this laughing, chattering lot of black humanity exposed for sale, though my good father doubtlessly turned away with a groan, when he reflected on what he had left behind him, in the old fatherland, to come to a country where there were liberty and equal rights for all. I can fancy now what he must have felt when he spoke to the little woolly-head, in his sharp, accentuated dialect, which his admirers called "perfect English," as he passed his hand over her cheek and looked into her face with his great, kind eyes. He said he had brought his children to a free country, where they could learn to work for themselves, and carve out their own fortunes; and where they must learn to govern themselves, and not govern others. Day after day, on foot or in carriage, we rambled through the streets, and I never addressed a single question to the driver or any of the party, satisfied with what information accidentally fell on my half-closed ear. I was living over again one of the dreams of my early days: the dream I had dreamed over again so often, among the snows of the biting, cold Missouri winter, and on the hot, dusty plains of Arizona, amid the curses of those famishing with thirst and the groans of the strong men dying from the fierce stroke of the unrelenting sun. Passing through the parks and by the marketplaces, I saw again the negro women, with yellow turbans and white aprons, offering for sale all the tempting tropical fruits which foreigners so crave, and still dread. And I thought I saw again the white, untutored hands of my father, as he laboriously prepared seats for us in the deepest shade of the park, and dealt out to us the coveted orange and banana. The cool, delicious fruit, and the picture of flowers and trees in the park; the black, kindly faces of the negro servants, and the laughing, white-clad children at play--how often I had seen them again in my dreams on the desert!