In his “Naval War of 1812,” Theodore Roosevelt thus graphically describes the place as he thought it was then: “Amid the gloomy semi-tropical swamps that covered the quaking delta thrust out into the blue waters of the Mexican Gulf by the strong torrent of the mighty Mississippi, stood the fair French city of New Orleans. Its lot had been strange and varied. Won, and lost once and again, in conflict with the subjects of the Catholic king, there was a strong Spanish tinge in the French blood that coursed so freely through the veins of its citizens; joined by purchase to the great Federal Republic, it yet shared no feeling with the latter save that of hatred to the common foe. And now an hour of sore need had come upon the city, for against it came the red English, lords of fight by land and sea. A great fleet of war vessels—ships of the line, frigates and sloops—under Admiral Cochrane, was on the way to New Orleans, convoying a still larger fleet of troop ships, with aboard them some ten thousand fighting men, chiefly the fierce and hearty veterans of the Peninsular War, who had been trained for seven years in the stern school of the Iron Duke, and who were now led by one of the bravest and ablest of all Wellington’s brave and able lieutenants, Sir Edward Pakenham.” When the President wrote that he was young and undecided whether he would hunt grizzlies or write poetry, I, for one, am glad he hunted the grizzly. Imagine any man standing on the melilotus-covered levees of the Father of Rivers and tracing from horizon to horizon the faint penciling of a sky so blue that it flushes at times into purple, corralling in the compass of its circle, now an old mansion, pecan-shadowed and wisteria-crowned, now a meadow, cattle-dotted and sheened with little lakes, now groves of oak and ash, moss swept with hoariness, now fields beyond, broad in their Southern fullness, big in benisons of eternal summer—imagine this true picture, and then hearing from the Far North the sepulchral croak of a sophomoric bullfrog: “Amid the g-l-o-omy semi-tropical s-w-a-a-mps that covered the q-u-a-king delta!” I failed to see the gloomy swamps, and the only things that ever quaked there were the bull-bellied British, marching nearly a century ago for the lust and plunder on this fair Creole city, utterly unconscious that any foe worthy of their steel and stomachs stood before them, until suddenly out of the sunset and shadows of the memorable day of the evening of their landing Jackson’s grim Indian fighters fell on them in the darkness and fought them to a finish, as they fought all beasts, at close quarters, with clubbed guns and bear-knives. That was the night of December 23d, 1814, the beginning of the battle of New Orleans. [Illustration: Old breastworks, primrose-covered.]