dreadful fire had taken place, that burnt
down a whole street of cotton warehouses and
cotton presses, and emporiums of Southern
produce. I saw the ruins when I visited the city,
still black and hot, just by the great square
where the statue of Henry Clay is, and not far
from the Levee, as the shore of the Mississippi
is called. As Schiller says, "Red as blood was that
night," all the town was in a seethe; the crowd
was a piebald of gesticulating black and white
faces; the whole sky, from Poydras-street to the
furthest bayous leading out to Lake Pontchartrain,
was burning crimson; millions of dollars melted
in the blaze; the young firemen were roused to
the highest pitch of audacity; all the town was
in it rattle with the hose carts and the swift
engines; the bells rang in every street; the coloured
lights flashed about; the telegraph was never
still. Through wreaths of smoke; through terrible
dangers of falling stones and beams, and
avalanches of fire, rushed the brave young men with
the ladders, hooks, ropes, and axes. Suddenly,
all cries were hushed by a roar as of an earthquake;
two vast walls fell and buried at once
fifteen of the best young men; the moment's
hush was broken by a scream from the survivors
who, but five minutes ago, had been all roaring
with open mouths, the popular fireman's
song of

     "Wake up boys, the engine's coming."

The papers, ever since, have used this terrible
calamity at New Orleans as an argument for
employing paid firemen who are less rash than
volunteers, and who are always ready and quite
as effective; though, perhaps, not so daring.

                       THE STATUES.

IT was far norland; the great abbey rose,
  A huge thought sculptured wild in marble freaks;
On peaked roof and crochet sparked the snows,
  And on the carven vultures' wings and beaks.
The tangled pine-trees wrestled with the palm
  In the fierce casements' interchanging bloom;
  And from the misty aisles, and from the gloom,
Shake mournful voices, echoings of calm.

Under vast canopies, whose cloudy blue
  Was tired with fixèd stars, three statues slept,
And, bending white above them, two and two,
  With arched necks, the torchless angels wept.
Upsprung in clustered reeds the granite stone,
  Blown at the top to lilies garlanded,
  Round wizard-eyed grotesque and griffin head,
And flutes and timbrels, uttering no moan.

Great were the three: a mailed but casqueless knight,
  Plated in armour dimly red with gold,
And frozen beard thick wrinkled, stiff and white
  Over his quartered surcoat's blazoned fold.
Stark, at his feet, there crouched a sleeping hound,
  And, on the dark base of the tomb, we read:
  "Great deeds are living spirits; the great dead
Find sepulchre in earth and ocean's round."

And, by his side, there lay a matron fair,
  Her coif blown backward like a crimson flame,
Over a delicate band of golden hair,
  And temples tinctured with the hues of shame;
With folded wings and eyes that stared the day,
  A fettered eagle at her feet did sit;
  And, on the windings of the scroll was writ:
"She pleaseth God who careth her own way."

Then turned we where the fairer statue, prone
  And sphered in the adoring silences,
With smiles that half incarnadined the stone,
  Slept in her more than human loveliness.
Her virgin forehead gleamed from out her hood,
  Like to a little moonfleck in the spring,
  And all her hair went wildly wavering
Over her shoulders, in dishevelled mood.

A sense of peace, an atmosphere of rest,
  Sucked from the heart of autumn, filled the place;
The evening of a planet beaming west,
  With all the sinking sun upon its face;
Upgathered childhood to our gazing eyes;
  Again the dead dropped blossoms at our doors;
  Again at sunset from the western shores;
We heard the tolling bells of paradise.

Beautiful abstraction, at her feet
  Crouched not the crimson fangèd dog of blood,
Stiff at her soles and blind from sun and sleet,
  No carrion eagle in its shackles stood;
But round a little urn of tender hue,
  With simplest allegories overwrought,
  The daisy and the dumb forget-me-not,
In braided meshes with the violet blew.

And on the smooth cirque of the funeral stone,
  Touched with the mellow twilight, here and there,
Along the shining surface, faintly shone
  A brief inscription, carved in letters fair:
"God is all love; who loveth best loves God:
  Love is the ladder of the patriarch,
  Scaling the brink of heaven through the dark,
Its foot the earth, its top God's bright abode!"

We ceased; from galleried round and fretted choir,
  And hollow roofs the cisterns of the gloom,
The autumn evening, like a gust of fire,
  Rolled mournful splendours on the maiden's tomb.
And, at the fountains of our secret tears,
  Throbbing for issue blindest pulses strove;
  And in our hearts fell, with that dream of love,
The sad and sweet divinity of years.

                 OYSTERS.

IT is a striking example of the wondrous
ingratitude of Man that the things which we are
most bound to love and reverence should almost
always be treated by us in the scurviest and
most shameful manner. It would seem as if
people supposed that their neighbours were all
like Archoishop Cranmer, whose forgiving
nature was such that you had only to do him " a
shrewd turn" to make him your friend for ever,
so ill do we behave to our greatest benefactors.
This mode of proceeding is bad enough,
in all conscience, where the objects of it are our
own fellow-creatures, with the capacity, and
very often the will, to resent our conduct; but
its enormity reaches the highest point when
those whom we abuse are beings at once so
helpless and inoffensive as to be utterly
incapable of retaliation.

Looking at it in a moral point of view, this
is the state of the case as regards Oysters.

From the days of that traditionally courageous
individual (a Native of these isles I imagine, for
"like will to like") who first swallowed the
"Ostrea edulis," to those of him " who did but
yesterday suspire" (that is to say, supped last
night in the Haymarket), all the world have