Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/320

 foreigners and citizens from the northern states, is now ostensibly checked by a species of taxation called license. Thus, every store-keeper pays an annual assessment of 110 dollars to the commonwealth. Every pedlar 12 dollars. Every Pharo bank and Roulette table 500 dollars a year, and every Billiard table 50 dollars. In excuse for thus tolerating the Pharo bank and the Roulette, the legislature affirm their inability to check the evil by punishment.

{243} 18th.] This morning we arrived at New Orleans,[245] now said to contain about 45,000 inhabitants, a great proportion of whom are of French extraction and retain their mother tongue. The situation of the town, which was begun in 1718, is rendered unhealthy by the swamp which circumscribes its western suburb, and which continues at all seasons totally impassable. A short canal crosses it, forming a communication with the bayou St. John, and lake Ponchartrain, by which means a commercial communication is opened to Mobile, Pensacola, and the Alabama territory.

In the neighbourhood of the city, and along the coast, the beautiful groves of orange trees, orchards of the fig, and other productions of the mildest climates, sensibly indicate our approach to the tropical regions, where the dreary reign of winter is for ever unknown. But little pains as yet have been taken to introduce into this country, though so thickly settled, the ornamental and useful plants which it is calculated to sustain. We yet neither see the olive, the date, nor the vineyard, notwithstanding the adaptation of the climate to their culture. That the date itself would succeed, an accidental example in the city