New Orleans is not the only French city in the United States, but it is the only one which preserves the French quality and language perfectly, and in that respect resembles Montreal and Quebec. St. Louis had a French and Spanish basis, but when that post became American the small Latin element was compelled, in self-defense, to adopt the language and living of the Anglo-Saxons. New Orleans, however, had a sufficient start when the Americans occupied it in 1803, to grow relatively with the American settlers and consequently two cities arose side by side, which still preserve their differences as much as if a quarter of London and a quarter of Paris had been cut out and united. Besides, there was a large rural and planting element in Louisiana, of the French stock, which has assisted to keep up the French infusion, and hence the market at New Orleans is the most characteristic thing in the city, where the _habitants_ and the hucksters, the fishers from the Gulf, and the porters and carters, carry us back to a scene anterior to the France of to-day, or before republican ideas had reached the far French colonies. New Orleans, too, constantly received emigration from neighboring French and Spanish islands and coasts as they were affected by negro insurrections, or by internal revolutions. Naturally the fleeing planters from Hayti and the Lesser Antilles made their way to the nearest large town, and the steam shipping of the Gulf all concentrates at the two centers of the ellipse, New Orleans and Havana. The Mississippi River, which is the only river of the first class on the globe to pass through a cultivated land and an enlightened population, sufficiently marks New Orleans as the eye of its destiny adjacent to its mouth. There are many Americans who have never been to New Orleans, who are unaware that it, like New York, has two distinct harbors or outlets. As New York has Long Island Sound and the Bay of New York, one opening a hundred miles to the east of the other, so New Orleans has a lake system close by which gives her internal communication far to the east, or almost to the bay of Mobile, and saves her two hundred miles of round-about river navigation to reach her own coasts. It may be thought that New Orleans is too far from the mouth of the Mississippi to command that the commerce of the Gulf should come a hundred miles up that river for her benefit, yet Philadelphia and Baltimore are quite as far from the ocean, and these cities have easily commanded a great interior trade through the communications they possessed, and from the products they had to supply. Coal, for example, makes the most effective article of the commerce of both Baltimore and Philadelphia, and coal is more valuable in the Gulf because farther from the mines, than it is on the near east coast. The coal furnished to the shipping at New Orleans has descended the entire line of the river, yet by such easy facilities that at New Orleans it is probably the cheapest