Ask the average resident of New Orleans if his town is on an island, and he will tell you no.  He will also wonder how any one could have got that notion,—­so completely has Orleans Island, whose name at the beginning of the present century was in everybody’s mouth, been forgotten.  It was once a question of national policy, a point of difference between Republican and Federalist, whether the United States ought to buy this little strip of semi-submerged land, or whether it would not be more righteous to steal it.  The Kentuckians kept the question at a red heat by threatening to become an empire by themselves if one course or the other was not taken; but when the First Consul offered to sell all Louisiana, our commissioners were quite robbed of breath.  They had approached to ask a hair from the elephant’s tail, and were offered the elephant.

For Orleans Island—­island it certainly was until General Jackson closed Bayou Manchac—­is a narrow, irregular, flat tract of forest, swamp, city, prairie and sea-marsh, lying east and west, with the Mississippi, trending southeastward, for its southern boundary, and for its northern, a parallel and contiguous chain of alternate lakes and bayous, opening into the river through Bayou Manchac, and into the Gulf through the passes of the Malheureuse Islands.  On the narrowest part of it stands New Orleans.  Turning and looking back over the rear of the town, one may easily see from her steeples Lake Pontchartrain glistening away to the northern horizon, and in his fancy extend the picture to right and left till Pontchartrain is linked in the west by Pass Manchac to Lake Maurepas, and in the east by the Rigolets and Chef Menteur to Lake Borgne.

An oddity of the Mississippi Delta is the habit the little streams have of running away from the big ones.  The river makes its own bed and its own banks, and continuing season after season, through ages of alternate overflow and subsidence, to elevate those banks, creates a ridge which thus becomes a natural elevated aqueduct.  Other slightly elevated ridges mark the present or former courses of minor outlets, by which the waters of the Mississippi have found the sea.  Between these ridges lie the cypress swamps, through whose profound shades the clear, dark, deep bayous creep noiselessly away into the tall grasses of the shaking prairies.  The original New Orleans was built on the Mississippi ridge, with one of these forest-and-water-covered basins stretching back behind her to westward and northward, closed in by Metairie Ridge and Lake Pontchartrain.  Local engineers preserve the tradition that the Bayou Sauvage once had its rise, so to speak, in Toulouse street.  Though depleted by the city’s present drainage system and most likely poisoned by it as well, its waters still move seaward in a course almost due easterly, and empty into Chef Menteur, one of the watery threads of a tangled skein of “passes” between the lakes and the open Gulf.  Three-quarters of a century ago this Bayou Sauvage (or Gentilly—­corruption of Chantilly) was a navigable stream of wild and sombre beauty.