April 7. To the Exposition. Spent the morning in my office, writing to the women who have lent us their books, telling of the plan to give the whole collection of 1400 volumes to the New Orleans Women’s Club at the close of the Exposition. April 23. Louisiana Day! Sixty thousand people in Exposition Park; order and good feeling everywhere. I am asked to be sponsor for one of the companies in the competition drill next week. Very charming, the way they have here of bringing the ladies into public ceremonies. Last night to a _fête_ at the Jockey Club. Full moonlight. Fifteen hundred doctors gathered for the Medical Congress were invited. Most of them came; some were rough diamonds! April 24. To a wedding in the old cathedral of St. Louis. The bride, Miss Daisy Breaux (now Mrs. Calhoun), was followed by a dozen bridesmaids dressed as field flowers. Two fairy children walked before the bride, whose long court train was carried by a pair of little black velvet pages with Van Dyke collars. Her face looked like a sunbeam caught between the folds of her wedding veil. At the reception met Mr. Walker Fearn, the newly appointed Minister to Greece. He asked me much of Athens. He seems quite the right man for the office. He has a good-looking daughter. April 25. General Beauregard and Mr. Nott drove us to the Spanish Fort for dinner. The blue iris, so wonderful last week, has almost gone. The talk was thrilling. The General spoke of the Mexican War, where he first distinguished himself; of the beauty of the country, the exhilarating life free from care, full of excitement. I asked him if he had hesitated about throwing in his lot with the Confederacy in 1861,--he was superintendent of the military academy at West Point at the time the war broke out. “No,” he said, “I was sorry, but I did not hesitate. Louisiana, my own State, summoned me; it was as if the voice of my mother had called me.” General Beauregard looks more a Frenchman than an American, and prefers to speak French. He is small, active, with fiery eyes, and a military cut. He does not like to talk about the Civil War, and is almost the only person here I have known well who has not mentioned General Butler and the silver spoons. On the twenty-fifth of April, 1862, twenty-three years before the day we dined with General Beauregard at the Spanish Fort, our friend Lieutenant George Hamilton Perkins, with Captain Bailey of the United States Navy, landed on the levee at New Orleans and walked alone through an angry mob to the City Hall to demand the surrender of the city in the name of Commodore Farragut. More than once I have asked my friend Commodore Perkins to tell me of that adventure, but he always put me off, saying it was too old a story. George Cable, who as a boy saw the whole affair, thus describes it: