The writer recently made a visit to a section of the country that still retains much of its own distinctive individuality and charm, most delightful in these days, when the various widely-differing regions of our vast commonwealth seem to be trying to become as much alike as possible, and the very word _provincial_ is a name of scorn. We left New Orleans in the early morning and much time was consumed in crossing the Mississippi on a ferry. Soon after reaching the other side, the sugar plantations began, and our way lay through mile after mile of brown furrowed fields stretching, as flat as the sea, to the distant river levee, the only high ground in sight. What a glorious scene it must be in the spring, when the young green cane begins to sprout, or in the fall, when it stands drawn up full height, waiting to be cut! It is an extremely wet country, full of countless ditches and trenches, and there is something about the flat land and straight, intersecting canals that reminds one of Holland. As the train swept through one plantation after another, we could see in the distance, gleaming white homesteads, set in little islands of green live-oaks, cut off by a fence from the spreading sea of bare fields. Each plantation had its sugar-house, lifting four or five tall smoke-stacks in air, and its laborers' quarters--quite a little village of cabins or cottages, and sometimes, we ran close enough to see old-time darkies in actual red bandannas, staring at the train. There is a class of French "poor whites" in this region, called "Cajins"--a corruption of "Arcadians"--and they are indeed a forlorn remnant of those unfortunate exiles who wandered all the way from Nova Scotia to the bayous of Louisiana. The writer's memory reverted in a flash to the fields of Grandpré, which she had visited only last summer, and to the vision of the lonely well-sweep and straggling line of ancient French willows, which once bordered the vanished village street. Strange to say, there is a noticeable resemblance between the flat, inlet-threaded meadows of the Minas Basin and the winding bayous around us. Occasionally the plantations would give way to swamps, where palmettos, bamboos, and cypresses with their weirdly beautiful trailing moss, were growing out of a watery, glassy floor, and it was hard to realize that if drained, these marshes would be quite as good soil as the rest. We saw a solitary hunter, gun in hand, standing on a bit of tree trunk in the bog; how he could have gotten there without a boat or else wings, is a mystery.