At the date of cession to the United States, New Orleans had perhaps fourteen hundred houses, mostly built of wood and uniformly homely. Two hours would have laid the whole of it in ashes. In the best part, a few houses were built of brick, some one, some two stories high, with the open galleries running round the outside, one is accustomed to see in the tropics; yet though it had been burned over so recently as 1794, New Orleans was little bettered in the rebuilding, showing, as before, a collection of hurriedly built barracks and dwellings, among which the Hotel de Ville and Parochial Church, alone, gave a certain metropolitan character to this city of wood and shingles. Though spacious, the streets were unpaved, dirty, and ill-kept. No drainage could be had, and every thing was thrown into the street. Summer heats quickly developed epidemic fevers. It followed that New Orleans had the name of being the most unhealthy city in the United States. Besides the church and Hotel de Ville, or City Hall, there were a military hospital, charity hospital, and nunnery,—all equally inconspicuous in point of architectural design. There was also a theatre in which a company, whom the revolt had driven from St. Domingo, acted plays for the gratification of the Creole population. Going north, Natchitoches on Red River, and Arkansas Post on the Arkansas, may be considered outposts of the country immediately dependent upon New Orleans. Each tapped the Indian trade of its river. The first was a thriving, the second a poor village. We next come upon a group of settlements, constituting what was known, under French and Spanish rule, as Upper Louisiana, with St. Louis for its emporium. Chief among these were New Madrid,[1] Cape Girardeau, St. Genevieve, Carondelet, and St. Charles. The population, all told, counting from the Arkansas to the Missouri, and including St. Louis, numbered about six thousand, of whom at least a thousand were slaves, with a sprinkling of half-breed French-Indian trappers besides. St. Louis had arisen out of the transfer of the east bank of the Mississippi to Great Britain. Rather than live as aliens, under English laws, many French settlers went with Pierre Laclede,[2] across the Mississippi, to a place already nicknamed by them Pain Court, where, in February, 1764, they founded a new town with the name of St. Louis, in honor of Louis XV. [Illustration: OLD CONVENT, NEW ORLEANS.]