That is not to say, of course, that we did not go also to the Louisiane and Galatoire’s, or that we did not drop in for luncheon, sometimes, at Brasco’s, in Gravier Street, or at Kolb’s, a more or less conventional German restaurant in St. Charles Street; or that we failed to go out to Tranchina’s at Spanish Fort, on Lake Pontchartrain, or to the quainter little place called Noy’s where, we learned, Ernest Peixotto had been but a short time before, gathering material for indigestion and an article in “Scribner’s Magazine.”  But when all is said and done there remain the three restaurants of the old quarter.

I should like to give some history of Galatoire’s as well as of the other two, but when I asked the patron for the story of his restaurant, he smiled, and with a shrug replied:  “But Monsieur, the story is in the food!”

Do not expect any of these places to present the brilliant appearance of distinguished New York restaurants.  They are comparatively simple, all of them, and are engaged not with soft carpets and gilt ceilings, but with the art of cookery.

I have been told that some of them have what may be termed “tourist cooking,” which is not their best, but if you know good food, and let them know you know it, and if you visit them at any time except during the carnival, then you have a right to expect in any one of these establishments, a superb dinner.  For as I once heard my friend Col.  Beverly Myles, one of the city’s most distinguished gourmets, remark:  “To talk of ‘tolerably good food’ in a French restaurant is like talking of ‘a tolerably honest man.’”

The carnival of Mardi Gras and the several days preceding, is one of those things about which I feel as I do concerning Niagara Falls, and gambling houses, and the red light district of Butte, Montana, and the underground levels of a mine, and the world as seen from an aeroplane, and the Quatres Arts ball, and a bull fight—­I am glad to have seen it once, but I have no desire to see it again.  During the carnival my companion and I enjoyed a period of sleepless gaiety.  To be sure, we went to bed every morning, but what is the use in doing that if you also get up every morning?  We went to the street pageants, we went to the balls at the French Opera House, we saw the masking on the streets, and when the carnival was finished we were finished, too.

The great thing about the carnival, it seems to me, is that it bears the relation to the life of the city, that a well-developed hobby does to the life of an individual.  It keeps the city young.  It keeps it from becoming pompous, from taking itself too seriously, from getting into a rut.  It stimulates not alone the young, but the grave and reverend seigniors also, to give themselves up for a little while each year to play, and moreover to use their imaginations in annually devising new pageants and costumes.  From this point of view such a carnival would be a good thing for any city.