New Orleans burgeons with the season.  The broad fair avenues, the wide boulevards, famed Canal street, are luxuriant with spring life and drapery.  Dashing equipages glance down the Shell Road with merry driving-and picnic-parties.  There is boating on the lake, and delicious French collations at pleasant resorts, spread by neat-handed mulatto waiters speaking a patois of French, English and negro.  There spring meats and sauces and light French wines allure to enjoyments less sensual than the coarser Northern climate affords.

The unrivaled French opera is in season, the forcing house of that bright garden of exotics.  Other and Northern cities boast of such entertainments, but I apprehend they resemble the Simon-Pure much as an Englishman’s French resembles the native tongue.  In New Orleans it is the natural, full-flavored article, lively with French taste and talent, and for a people instinct with a truer Gallic spirit, perhaps, than that of Paris itself.  It is antique and colonial, but age and the sea-voyage have preserved more distinctly the native bouquet of the wine after all grosser flavors have wasted away.  The spectacle within the theatre on a fine night is brilliant, recherche and French.  From side-scene to dome, and from gallery after gallery to the gay parquette, glitters the bright, shining audience.  There are loungers, American and French, blase and roue, who in the intervals drink brandy and whisky, or anisette, maraschino, curcoa or some other fiery French cordial.  The French loungers are gesticulatory, and shoulders, arms, fingers, eyes and eyebrows help out the tongue’s rapid utterance; but they are never rude or boisterous.  There are belles, pretty French belles, with just a tint of deceitless rouge for fashion’s sake, and tinkling, crisp, low French voices modulated to chime with the music and not disharmonize it; nay, rather add to the sweetness of its concord.

And there is the Creole dandy, the small master of the revels.  There is nothing perfumed in the latest box of bonbons from Paris so exquisite, sparkling, racy, French and happy in its own sweet conceit as he is.  He has hands and feet a Kentucky girl might envy for their shapely delicacy and dainty size, cased in the neatest kid and prunella.  His hair is negligent in the elegantest grace of the perruquier’s art, his dress fashioned to the very line of fastidious elegance and simplicity, yet a simplicity his Creole taste makes unique and attractive.  He has the true French persiflage, founded on happy content, not the blank indifference of the Englishman’s disregard.  It becomes graceful self-forgetfulness, and yet his vanity is French and victorious.  In the atmosphere of breathing music and faint perfume he looks around the glancing boxes, and knows he has but to throw his sultanic handkerchief to have the handsomest Circassian in the glowing circle of female beauty.  But he does not throw it, for all that.  His manner plainly says:  “Beautiful dames,