Five miles below the city the street car lines stop, but it is an interesting walk to clamber up on the bermuda and melilotus-covered levee and follow the river to the Chalmette battlefield. The air is soft and warm, the big river sweeps splendid along, the beautiful old homes on the banks peep sleepily out from pecan and great moss-covered oaks. Far away to the southeast stretch plain and forest. No wonder they fought for it, you say. Who would wish to die in a fairer land, under sunnier skies? Then you get a shock. [Illustration: The field across which the British charged.] Just at the battlefield and where the unfinished Chalmette monument (and why should it remain unfinished, O, ye of little faith save in your scrambling for dollars?) looms up there is a repulsive derrick very nearly on the spot where Jackson’s grim lines ran up to the river, and where the Carolina’s fiery little battery spat at the Red Coats from their earthworks. All around are evidences of something that smells like Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Morgan or New York Life. It is a sugar refinery, said to be the biggest of its kind anywhere—a trust, and hence a thief by nature, and now it has butted into the battlefield, buying as it goes, and paying for the privilege of wiping sentiment out with sugar-coated pills. Its great banks already overtop the spot where Jackson stood under the moss-grown oaks. Its embankments shut out the sun of New Orleans. When it gets ready it will take the rest of the battlefield. The sight of it and its vandalism hurts, and the hurt was worse when I found that New Orleans did not care. Nay, I think from what I heard, that she was prouder of the refinery than she was of the battle; for everybody could tell me of the refinery, and no one knew anything of the battle save a little woman who kept the cottage and grounds where the half-completed Chalmette monument marked the spot of Jackson’s breastworks and glorious stand. She knew that Jackson’s breastworks ran down the row of trees at the lane, that his headquarters were right over there in that clump of old oaks, and that Pakenham was buried for six months under that pecan tree, where some old masonry showed there had been a grave. The rest of it I had to dig out of the library of the Historical Society. An old fisherwoman who stood on the levee where Jackson’s line touched the river, and where the cotton bales were confiscated to help form the first line of breastworks, in answer to my question, told me, after expectorating a large quantity of snuffy fluid into the river, that she “had heurn of a right peart fight bein’ fit hereabouts when my mammy was a baby—but jes’ whur I can’t say.” [Illustration: “That Jackson’s headquarters were right over there in that clump of oaks.” The trees alone were there, this house having been built after the original one was burned.]