of that beautiful woman and charming actress, Miss Placide, with the poetical epitaph written for her by Caldwell; the lines which every woman in society in New Orleans, fifty years ago, was expected to know and repeat. The Mexican war is commemorated in it by a monument to one of the heroes and victims, General Bliss. The great epidemics make their entries year after year; pathetic reading it is; all young, strong, and brave, according to their epitaphs, and belonging to the best families. The epidemics of '52 and '53 date the opening of new cemeteries, in which the lines of the ghastly trenches are still to be traced.
The Metairie cemetery (transformed from the old race track) contains the archives of the new era—after the civil war and the reconstruction. In it are Confederate monuments, and the tombs of a grandeur surpassing all previous local standards. As the saying is, it is a good sign of prosperity when the dead seem to be getting richer.
The old St. Louis cemetery is closed now. It opens its gates only at the knock of an heir, so to speak; gives harbourage only to those who can claim a resting-place by the side of an ancestor. Between All Saints and All Saints, its admittances are not a few, and the registry volumes are still being added to; the list of names, in the first crumbling old tome, is still being repeated, over and over again; some of them so old and so forgotten in the present that death has no oblivion to add to them. Indeed, we may say they live only in the death register.
Not a year has gone by since, on a January day, one of the bleakest winter days the city had known for half a century, a file of mourners followed one of the
