very quality of immortal youth and loveliness which is so rare in cities, and is so much to be desired.  Charleston I might allegorize in the person of a young woman I met there.  I was in the drawing-room of a fine old house; a beautifully proportioned room, paneled to the ceiling, hung with family portraits and other old paintings, and furnished with mahogany masterpieces a century and a half old.  The girl lived in this house.  She was not exactly pretty, nor was her figure beautiful in the usual sense; yet it was beautiful, all the same, with a sort of long-limbed, supple, aristocratic aliveness.  Most of all there was about her a great fineness—­the kind of fineness which seems to be the expression of generations of fineness.  She was the granddaughter of a general in the Civil War, the great-granddaughter of an ambassador, the great-great-granddaughter of a Revolutionary hero, and though one could not but be thankful that she failed of striking resemblance to the portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her:  a background, nebulous and shadowy, out of which she had emerged.

Memphis, upon the other hand, will always be to me a lively modern debutante.  I vision her as dancing—­dancing to Handy’s ragtime music—­all shoulders, neck, and arms, and tulle, and twenty-dollar satin slippers.  Atlanta, too, is young, vivid, affluent, altogether modern; while as for Birmingham, she is pretty, but a little strident, a little overdressed; touched a little with the amiability, and the other qualities, of the nouveau riche.

The beauty of New Orleans is of a different kind.  She is a full-blown, black-eyed, dreamy, drawly creature, opulent of figure, white of skin, and red of lip.  Like San Francisco she has Latin blood which makes her love and preserve the carnival spirit; but she is more voluptuous than San Francisco, for not only is she touched with the languor and the fire of her climate, but she is without the virile blood of the forty-niner, or the invigorating contact of the fresh Pacific wind.  In my imaginary picture I see her yawning at eleven in the morning, when her negro maid brings black coffee to her bedside—­such wonderful black coffee!—­whereas, at that hour, I conceive San Francisco as having long been up and about her affairs.  Even in the afternoon I fancy my New Orleans beauty as a little bit relaxed.  But at dinner she becomes alive, and after dinner more alive, and by midnight she is like a flame.