The pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate forms, wrought in steel.

The ancient railings are hand-made, and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable.

They are become BRIC-A-BRAC.
The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of 'the Grandissimes.' In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.

In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it.
With Mr.Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure.

And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long- sighted native.
We visited the old St.Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices.
There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact.