Hand with joy and fear a-quaking,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Held the first of our newspapers.




A CARNIVAL JANGLE.


There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of
jester's noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colors; the streets
swarm with humanity,--humanity in all shapes, manners, forms,--laughing,
pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and children, as
varied and as assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever
a crowd that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.

It is Carnival in New Orleans; a brilliant Tuesday in February, when the
very air effervesces an ozone intensely exhilarating--of a nature half
spring, half winter--to make one long to cut capers. The buildings are a
blazing mass of royal purple and golden yellow, and national flags,
bunting and decorations that laugh in the glint of the Midas sun. The
streets a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet
girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of
music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled
horses. A madding dream of color and melody and fantasy gone wild in an
effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes
kaleidoscope-like before the bewildered eye.