I must admit, however, that of late years New Orleans has developed a perfect case of dual personality, and that, as often happens where there is dual personality, one side of her nature seems altogether incompatible with the other.  The very new New Orleans has no resemblance to the picture I have drawn; moreover, my picture is not her favorite likeness of herself.  She prefers more recent ones—­pictures showing the lines of determination which, within the last ten years have stamped themselves upon her features, as she has fought and overcome the defects of character which logically accompanied her peculiar, temperamental type of charm.  I, upon the other hand, am like some lover who values most an older picture of the woman he adores.  I admire her for building character, but it is by her languorous beauty that I am infatuated, and the portrait which most effectively displays that beauty is the one for which I care.

Her very failings were so much a part of her that they made us the more sympathetic; she was too lovely to be greatly blamed for anything; gazing into her eyes, we hardly noticed that there was dust under the piano and in the corners; dining at her sumptuous table, we gave but little thought to the fact that the cellar was damp, the house none too healthy, and that there were mosquitoes and rats about the place; nor did it seem to matter, in face of her allurements, that she was shiftless, extravagant, improvident in the management of her affairs.  If these things were brought to our attention, we excused them on the grounds of Latin blood and enervating climate.

But if we excused her, she did not excuse herself.  Without being shaken awake by an earthquake, or forced to action by a devastating fire or flood, she set to work, calmly and of her own volition, to reform her character.

First she cleaned house, providing good surface drainage, an excellent filtered water supply from the river in place of her old mosquito-breeding cisterns, and modern sewers in place of cesspools.  She killed rats by the hundreds of thousands, rat-proofed her buildings, and thus, at one stroke, eliminated all fear of bubonic plague.  She began to take interest in the public schools, and soon trebled their advantages.  She concerned herself with the revision of repressive tax laws.  She secured one of the best street railway systems in the country.  But, perhaps most striking of all, she set to work to build scientifically toward the realization of a gigantic dream.  This dream embodies the resumption by New Orleans of her old place as second seaport city.  To this end she is doing more than any other city to revive the commerce of the Mississippi River, and is at the same time making a strong bid for trade by way of the Panama Canal, as well as other sea traffic.  She has restored her forty miles of water front to the people, has built municipal docks and warehouses at a cost of millions, and has so perfectly cooerdinated her