and I have seen little children, half Italian, half Filipino, who were saved by being carried by their parents into the branches of an old live-oak, where they waited until good Horace Harvey, “the little father of the Baratarias,” came down there in his motor yacht, the Destrehan, rescued them, warmed them, fed them, and gave them back to life.  I was told in New Orleans that there were ten seconds in that storm when the wind reached a velocity of 140 miles per hour at the mouth of the Mississippi, that it blew for four hours at the rate of 90 miles, and that the lowest barometrical reading ever recorded in the United States (28.11) was recorded in New Orleans during this hurricane.

Of the summer climate of New Orleans I know nothing at first hand, and judging from what people have told me, that is all I want to know.  The winter climate suited me very well while I was there, although the boast that grass is green and roses bloom all the year round, does not imply such intense heat as some people may suppose.  Furthermore, I believe that the thermometer has once or twice in the history of the city dropped low enough to kill any ordinary rose, for a friend of mine told me a story about some water pipes that froze and burst during an unprecedented cold snap which occurred some years ago.  He said that an English colonel, whom he knew, was visiting the city at the time and that, finding himself unable to get water in his bathtub, he sent out for several cases of Apollinaris, and with true British phlegm proceeded to empty them into the tub and get in among the bubbles.

Still another figure having to do with literature, and also with the history of New Orleans, is Jean Lafitte, known as a pirate, whose life is said to have inspired Byron’s poem, “The Corsair.”  There was a time, long ago, when Lafitte, together with his brother, his doughty lieutenant, Dominique You, and his rabble of Baratarians, caused New Orleans a great deal of annoyance, but like many other doubtful characters, they have, since their death, become entirely picturesque, and the very idea that Lafitte was not a first-class blood-and-thunder pirate is as distasteful to the people of New Orleans to-day, as his being any kind of a near-pirate at all, used to be to their ancestors.  Nevertheless Frank R. Stockton, who made a great specialty of pirates, says of Lafitte:  “He never committed an act of piracy in his life; he was [before he went to Barataria] a blacksmith, and knew no more about sailing a ship or even the smallest kind of a boat than he knew about the proper construction of a sonnet....  It is said of him that he was never at sea but twice in his life:  once when he came from France, and once when he left this country, and on neither occasion did he sail under the Jolly Roger.”  According to Stockton, Lafitte, when he gave up his blacksmith shop (in which he is said to have made some of the fine wrought iron balcony railings which still adorn the old town), and went to Barataria, became nothing more nor less than a “fence” for pirates and privateers, taking their booty, smuggling it up to New Orleans, and selling it there on commission.