Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living. Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious, even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed, however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often, but New Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination. The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in the midst of which she is founded. One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafés and garden theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering, pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European, industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization, identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the usual public gardens strewn with the newspapers of the day. But though it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm, and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came. A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.