Here is the Absinthe House, worth but a single glance, for it has descended to the estate of an ordinary corner saloon. Only ordinary corner saloons are not ordinarily housed in structures of this sort. You can see houses like this in the south of France and in Spain--so I am told. For below Canal street is both French and Spanish. Remember, if you please, that the French of the Southland shared the same hard fate of their countrymen in that far northern valley of the great St. Lawrence--neglect. The French are the most loyal people on earth. Their fidelity to their language and their customs for nearly two centuries proves that. That faith, steadfast through the tragedy of the indifference and neglect of their mother country, doubly proves it. And the only difference between the Frenchman of Quebec and the Frenchman of New Orleans was that in the South the Spaniard was injected into the problem. But the Frenchman in the South was not less loyal than his fellow-countryman of the North. A dissolute king sitting in the wreck of his great family in the suburbs of Paris might barter away the title of his lands, but no Louis could ever trade away the loyalty of the older French of New Orleans to their land and its institutions. In such a faith was the French quarter of the city born. In such faith has it survived, these many years. And perhaps the very greatest episodes in the history of the city were in those twenty days of November, 1803, when the French flag displaced the Spanish in the old Place d'Armes, to be replaced only by the strange banner of a newborn nation which was given the opportunity of working out the destiny of the new France. So it was the Spaniard who took his part in the shaping of the French quarter of New Orleans. You can see the impress of his architects in the stout old houses that were built after two disastrous and wide-spread fires in the closing years of the eighteenth century--even in the great lion of the town; the Cabildo which rises from what was formerly the Place d'Armes and is today Jackson square. And the old Absinthe House, with its curiously wrought and half-covered courtyard is one of these old-time Spanish houses. Now forget about the absinthe--as the rest of the French folk of the land are beginning to forget it--and turn your attention to the courtyards. In another old Southern city--Charleston--the oldest houses shut the glories of their lovely-aging gardens from the sight of vulgar passers-by upon the street by means of uncompromising high fences. The old houses of New Orleans do more. Their gardens are shielded from the crowded, noisy, horrid streets by the houses themselves. And he who runs through those crowded, noisy, horrid streets, must really walk, for only so will he catch brief glimpses of the glories of those fading courtyard gardens.