38±	LIFE  ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white
roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the
phrase * city of the dead ^7 has all at once a meaning to him. Many
of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. "When
one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery,
he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as
neatly while they are alive as they do after they f»re dead, they would
find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the

IMMORTELLES.
•wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers, in vases
of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults : placed
there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children, husbands
and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow fisds its
inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly but
indestructible ' immortelle *—which is a wreath or cross or some such
emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow
rooefefce at the conjunction of the cross's bars—kind of sorrowful