It was in the winter of — (it does not matter about
the year) that I made my first visit to the Crescent
City, as New Orleans has been fancifully and felicitously
called. It was not then the wondrous business
metropolis that we now behold it; but sufficiently
stately, magnificent, and populous, even then, to turn
the head of a simple backwoodsman like myself.
Until that period, I had never beheld a city deserving
of the name—had never, in fact, been much beyond
the little village, in West Tennessee, which
constituted the nearest market-town to my father's
plantation. In brief, I was but a humble rustic,
without any of the advantages of travel, and but few
of education. Thus ignorant, at eighteen years of
age, I descended the Mississippi to the queen of cities,
seated at its mouth. I had for a companion, on this
expedition, a young friend, something older than

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myself, however, who, besides, had enjoyed a much
larger experience. Frederick Brandon was a Tennessean
also. He had seen something of our American
world—had been once among the Eastern States
and cities, and had passed more than once before
over the route which we now pursued. He knew
every headland, every plantation, and, as it seemed
to me, every person along the river. He was about
five years my senior, and had been better taught than
myself in almost every possible respect. I necessarily
deferred to him; I was pleased and proud to do
so. I had every confidence in his affection, and his
superior knowledge and judgment, and felt that he
could enlighten me on a thousand subjects, of which
my information was distressingly small. He was the
person to do so without mortifying my self-esteem,
having as little vanity and arrogance as I ever met
in any person whose claims were so considerable. To
him, New Orleans was no novelty, though always a
great attraction. He had a sister who had been married
some seven years before to a wealthy Creole of
the city, and frequent visits, and an occasional residence
with her, had made all its places familiar. He
was the man, over all others, to spy out all the secrets
and explore all the haunts of a great metropolis. He
possessed a lively curiosity, with an unexcitable temperament—
a rather rare combination—and was prompt
and active always, without showing either eagerness
or hurry. His nerves seemed to be wrought of steel.
Sternly resolute, even as a gladiator, he was yet not
easily ruffled. A man of great muscular power, he

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was yet slow to anger, and preferred always, where
this was possible, to excuse or to escape annoyance,
rather than, with unnecessary haste, to construe it
into an impertinence, which no person was more ready
to resent. With this temperament, at once cool and
curious, New Orleans had few mysteries which he had
not contrived to penetrate. Its walks and cafés, its
theatres and hells—for at this period the Crescent
City could boast of quite a number of licensed gaming
establishments of the most gigantic dimensions—were
all familiar to his footsteps. He seemed everywhere
to carry with him that spell of character, which is an
open sesame, throwing wide to the seeker every avenue
to the most secret recesses of social morals and of
the practices which mostly tend to lay bare, and render
active the secret susceptibilities and propensities
of the erring nature. Not that he himself was
either dissipated or vicious. On the contrary, he
never played, and was singularly temperate in all his
indulgences. I look back after a lapse of near thirty
years upon his character, as I knew it, with almost
the same degree of admiration now, which I felt for
him at first. His powers of caution, of circumspection
rather, of endurance, resistance, and subjectivity, were
indeed wonderful; and it is to their influence I
owe it, that I so soon learned to navigate the mysterious
avenues, and penetrate the doubtful abodes of
the great city, without suffering from its snares and
pitfalls, I could tell some queer stories about our
desultory wanderings and strange discoveries—but
these may serve a turn hereafter. Let it answer now,

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that, in the course of a few weeks, I had acquired
such a perfect carte du pays of the municipal and
social world into which I had thus, for the first time,
penetrated, that I too might have taken up the business
of the cicerone, in the goodly city, without greatly
discrediting my master.