Page:Creole Sketches.djvu/73

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A VISIT TO NEW ORLEANS
43

approvingly. "Good enough in its way," he said.

By twelve o'clock he had visited all the public institutions; — the Sanitary Association highly displeased him; but the Board of Health put him into an uproarious good humor. "I was a fool to come down here at all," he said; "this Board of Health can do my work better than I can do it myself, and the people seem to be just fools enough to let them do it. Instead of honest poverty, I find vicious poverty; instead of reform, demoralization; instead of law, I find lawyers; instead of justice, oppression. What Carnival King ever found a city so well prepared for him? I guess I shall leave at once; for I have no work to do as yet in Louisiana."

But before leaving, the Devil took a notion to alight upon the top of the State House to watch the Convention. He listened for several hours to the proceed-