The ovens are built in the great walls that encompass the older cemeteries and make them seem like crumbling fortresses. Four tiers high, each oven large enough to accommodate a coffin--the sealed fronts bear the epitaphs of those who have known the New Orleans of other days. A motley company they are--poets, pirates, judges, planters, soldiers, priests--around them the scarred regiments of those who lived their lives without the haunting touch of Fame upon the shoulder--no one will even venture a guess as to the number that have been laid away within a single one of these cities. And when you are done with seeing the graves of Jean Lafitte or Dominique You--why is it that the average mind pricks up with a more quickened interest at the tomb of a pirate than at a preacher--the Portuguese sexton begins plucking at the loosely laid bricks of one of these abandoned ovens. Abandoned? He lifts out a skull, this twentieth century Yorick and bids you peep through the aperture. Like the _concierge_ of the old hotel, looking is made more easy from a blazing folding copy of the morning _Picayune_. In the place are seemingly countless skulls, with lesser bones. "He had good teeth, this fellow," coughs the Portuguese. You do not answer. Finally-- "Do they bury all of them this way?" Not at first, you find. The strict burial laws of New Orleans demand that the body shall be carefully sealed and kept within the oven for at least a year. After that the sexton may open the place, burn the coffin and thrust the bones into the rear of the place. And New Orleans can see nothing unusual in the custom. * * * * * "New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco than any other community I have ever seen," says the Californian. Not in any architectural sense and of course two cities could hardly be further apart in location than the city in the flat marshlands whose trees are below the level of the yellow river at flood-tide, and the new city that rises on mountainous slopes from the clear waters of the Golden Gate. But there is an intangible likeness about New Orleans and his city that was but never again can be, that strikes to the soul of the Californian. Perhaps he has come to know something of the real life of the Creoles--of those strange folk who even today can say that they have lived long lives in New Orleans and never gone south of Canal street. Perhaps he has met some of that little company of old French gentlemen who keep their faded black suits in as trim condition as their own good manners, and who scrimp and save through years and months that they may visit--not Chicago or New York--but Paris, Paris the unutterable and the unforgettable. "New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco than any other community that I have ever seen," reiterates the Californian. "It is more like the old than the new San Francisco can ever become."