choir. At night the whole city is illuminated, and balls and festivities hold the hours until dawn.
The celebration, however, ended not with that day; the victory seemed only to have begun in New Orleans. For half a century afterwards the city appeared ever on a passage through triumphal arches, with states and territories throwing flowers in her path. There was no discussion thereafter over the question of her eligibility to a place in the Union, nor of the political equality of her citizens with the Americans. Year after year travellers from all over the continent and from Europe came to view the spot where the conquerors of Napoleon had been conquered, and to meet the heroes who had accomplished it. The glorious 8th of January eclipsed every other fête day in the city; its annual parade is one of the great memories of the happy childhood before the civil war. Not a negro nurse but, with face as bright as her Madras kerchief, could name the heroes of the Battalion d'Orleans as it passed, and tell of the great battle they had won, always linking in the company of the freemen of colour, with the heroism and patriotism of the whites. They were all Hectors and Achilleses to the proud children! And Jordan—but no one, not even the grand officers nor grander visitors in the parade, ever fired the childish heart so much as he—the young mulatto drummer, who beat his drum during all and every fight, in the hottest hell of the fire, and was complimented by Jackson himself after the battle. Long after the civil war, childhood can remember "Old Jordan" as he was then called, an aged mulatto in uniform, beating his old Chalmette drum in the parade, at the head of the white-haired, bent-backed, feebly-stepping veterans of 1812.
