The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional. The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new” part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it has its _vieux carrée_ in which its history is written, the old, or French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French, but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless, it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and French churches, it reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and grander. Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up, though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new. On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home. Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part, and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure and a dream.