The former beauty of New Orleans

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The French love of the beautiful, the Italian spirit of art, have made this city beautiful, something, something of Southern Europe lives in the Garden District, with its singing fountains, its box-trees cut into distaffs, its statues and fantastically trimmed shrubs, its palms and fig trees, and the yellow riches of its banana and orange orchards.

But it is in the very heart of the city, in the center of the business blocks, and hard by the Cotton Exchange, that one encounters the most charming surprise of this sort. Entering a paved archway from Common Street, you suddenly find yourself in a double court, and through the second archway beyond gleams a musical fountain whose marble basin is made verdant with water plants and flowers. Above stands Hebe every youthful in bronze, pouring nectar into her shapely cup, swan-birds curve stony necks at her feet, and about the lower basin four sinewy Tritons, whose nervous thighs end gracefully in dolphin tails, blow mightily through marble horns. It is delightful to meet these fragmentary dreams of antique art. these fancies of that older world which is yet ever young with the youth of immortality, thus hidden like treasures in the city's bosom. The windows of this central court all look down upon the fountain, and quaint balconies, worthy of Seville or Cordova, jut out overhead at all possible angles. This is Gallia Court, devoted, alas, to office purposes, by lawyers.... and by doctors....

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