The panorama is always interesting. There are wide silvery expanses of water, into which fall the shadows of great trees. A tug is dragging along a tow of old rafts composed of cypress logs all water-soaked, green with weeds and grass, so that it looks like a floating garden. What pictures! Clusters of oaks on the prairie; a picturesque old cotton-press; a house thatched with palmettoes; rice-fields irrigated by pumps; darkies, field-hands, men and women, hoeing in the cane-fields, giving stalwart strokes that exhibit their robust figures; an old sugar-mill in ruin and vine-draped; an old begass chimney against the sky; an antique cotton-press with its mouldering roof supported on timbers; a darky on a mule motionless on the bank, clad in Attakapas cloth, his slouch hat falling about his head like a roof from which the rafters have been withdrawn; palmettoes, oaks, and funereal moss; lines of Spanish-bayonets; rickety wharves; primitive boats; spider-legged bridges. Neither on the Teche nor the Atchafalaya, nor on the great plain near the Mississippi, fit for amphibious creatures, where one standing on the level wonders to sec the wheels of the vast river steamers above him, apparently without cause, revolving, is there any lack of the picturesque. New Iberia, the thriving mart of the region, which has drawn away the life from St. Martinsville, ten miles farther up the bayou, is a village mainly of small frame houses, with a smart court-house, a lively business street, a few pretty houses, and some oldtime mansions on the bank of the bayou, half smothered in old rose gardens, the ground in the rear sloping to the water under the shade of gigantic oaks. One of them, which with its outside staircases in the pillared gallery suggests Spanish taste on the outside, and in the interior the arrangement of connecting rooms a French chateau, has a self-keeping rose garden, where one might easily become sentimental; the vines disport themselves like holiday children, climbing the trees, the side of the house, and revelling in an abandon of color and perfume.