not one of those personal triumphs that shrivel into insignificance when critically examined. Rather does fresh research but enhance the splendor of the victory.

The sailor-diplomat on his return, now became author, and in his office at Washington, with a secretary, a couple of his faithful officers, and a Japanese servant, the big book of the Narrative of the Japan Expedition grew into form. Dr. Robert Toombs compiled an introductory chapter, the Rev. Dr. Francis Hawks wrote a preface, the brothers Evert and George Duyckinck furnished the index; maps, scientific papers, and surveys by naval officers, and letter-press descriptions for the plates by experts, were contributed; but the text of the narrative was from Perry's own hand and brain. Accustomed to the constant perusal and

OBVERSE OF GOLD MEDAL FROM THE MERCHANTS OF BOSTON.

copying for practice of the

English classics, the commodore was already master of a terse, graphic English style, while his book is all the better history because it is the autograph story of an eyewitness. It is written in the third person.

The printing of the work illustrates the methods of our Government publishing house. The work cost $360,000, and 18,000 copies were printed, an extra set of 200, with special illustrations, being sent to the governments of the world.

15,000

copies were ordered by Congress for members, each receiving 50 sets of the work, 3,000 copies were allowed to the officers of the squadron, of which Perry received 1,000. He presented 500 copies to Dr. Hawks, chiefly for putting his name to the work and writing the preface; so that all the extra pay, bounty, reward, or pension the commodore received from a grateful country for his triumph was 500 copies of his own book. When he died, his widow was most reluctantly accorded a niggardly pension, while neither officers nor crew received an extra dollar for the service which had so raised our national prestige in the eyes of the world. Compare with this the medals, orations, gifts, pensions and honors, both popular and official, granted to Oliver Hazard Perry and to many other naval officers, and one may well wonder whether we are a warlike or a peaceful people. Perhaps we lack the capacity of perception, or are economical in the wrong way.

The last public service performed by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry was as a member of the Naval Retiring Board. He was to have been given command of the European squadron, but after a short sickness, he died in New York, March 4, 1858. At his funeral services his own sailors and marines attended in a body, and the simple fife and drum music seemed to the listeners and spectators profoundly impressive from its very simplicity. He lies buried at Newport, beside the dust of that mother on whose bosom he first learned the worth of life, whose memory he worshiped through all his career, and beside whose relics he wished to sleep in death. Loving hands have erected a fitting memorial in marble over his grave.

His lineaments and form are preserved to us in an excellent marble bust by Palmer, of Albany, now in possession of Mrs. August Belmont, his daughter. A bronze statue, heroic size, on a granite pedestal adorned with bronze bas-reliefs, representing experiences in Africa, Mexico and Japan, by J. Q. A. Ward, stands in Touro Park, Newport. It was erected by Mr. Belmont, and unveiled October 1, 1868. In the Brooklyn Naval Lyceum, and in the library of the Annapolis Naval Academy, hang oil portraits, and his features are also represented on the gold medal struck by the merchants of Boston to commemorate the opening of Japan. In the Mikado's Empire the name of Perry is ever mentioned with honor, and a short time ago the Japanese merchants of Yokohama, entirely of their own accord, gave a banquet to celebrate the signing of Perry's treaty, in which speeches in their own language set forth at length the benefits which their country had received by Perry's visits.

Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry was indeed a typical, American

naval officer, a link between the old and the new, the present and the past. Had he lived until the outbreak of the rebellion, he would undoubtedly have won further distinction; for he was a man of advanced ideas, ever ready for the new and inevitable. As it was, few American citizens in any arm of the public service, military, naval, or diplomatic, have done more for the lasting good of their country. Nor have the fruits of his life ceased since his death, either in war or peace. When the Alabama sank from the sight of the sun with her wandering stars and the bars of slavery after her into the ocean's grave, the guns that sent her down were directed by Thornton, the efficient executive officer of the Kearsarge, and the favorite pupil of Commodore Perry; while thirty years of peaceful national progress in Japan testify that the victories of peace are none the less renowned than those of war.

Mm Elliot Griffis.

THE HEART OF LOUISIANA

THE PLACE D'ARMES IN HISTORY

When Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, French Governor of Louisiana, sent his engineer to the site of the present city of New Orleans in the year 1720, to map out the plan of the contemplated capital of the Province, the engineer, drawing his lines in the shape of a parallelogram extending four hundred feet along the river, and eighteen hundred feet toward the rear, inclosed within the limits of the future city a few shabby soldiers huts and Government warehouses erected two years before.* This was the beginning of New Orleans.

The engineer's task was not a pleasant one. The ground was swampy and overgrown with a rank semi-tropical vegetation. Here and there a small bayou wound its way through thickets of willow copses, latanier, tall reeds and grasses, low palmetto trees, cypresses moss-draped, and creeping vines. His feet, and those of his assistants, sank at almost every step in the ooze, or were immersed in the waters of dark pools. But after a while, when the task was completed, and the stakes planted, imaginary streets were marked out in the parallelogram around which were driven palisadoes as a measure of defense, ditches being dug to receive the rains and the superabundant water of the earth. Of the section of swamp thus reclaimed, one square fronting immediately on the river and situated in the exact center of the length of the parallelogram, was reserved for the service of the State. It was intended for a parade and review ground, and its destiny was to become, in time, the Place d'Armes of the French, the Plaza de Armas of the Spaniards, and the Jackson Square of the Americans. Even in that first hour of its existence it constituted, what it has continued to be to our day, the "Heart of Louisiana." That this square should have been made the center of the frontage of the city's plan was due to the circumstance that, when the engineer began his task of survey he found on the site of the present Cathedral of St. Louis, just behind the locality. selected for the Place d'Armes, a rude building, little more than a shed, which had been constructed hastily by the first settlers in 1718, as a place for religious worship. This section of a square was therefore reserved, at the same time, for the necessities of the Church, where it was decided to build

*Bienville was the son of Charles Le Moyne, and the third of four brothers-Iberville, Sauvolle, Bienville and Châteaugay-all of whom played important parts in the history of Louisiana. See Frontispiece.

the parish church, with other religious establishments, convents, etc. Therefore, Bienville's engineer drew the outlines of the future city around the primitive church-building, and the marshy open space, which in the

coming years

were to teem with so many memoriesmemories of strange, sad and joyous incidents, of gala days and

days of mour

ning, of fes

tivities and marriages and christenings and funerals; of the pa

geant

ry and alarms

of war, and of the gradual un

folding,

within a

single

century

of time, of the

civil au

thority

of four

domi

nations, which successively reared, above the spot from which the musing and worshiping Indian once had contemplated the swift flow of his great Meschacébé, the golden lilies of France, the castellated flag of Spain, the Stars and Stripes of the United States and the Stars and Bars of the Confederate States.