The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-02-27
GROWING A NEW ORLEANS

l QUEEN.
 | There is an old Persian legend to the effect that when the world was first
 created Allah made everything-earth and sea- and flower and tree-of a daz- lzling whiteness, and so great was the | hideousness thereof that man hid his
 face from it, and could not look upon it.
 At last, however, Allah took pity upon l him, and smiled upon rose, and it blushed red he touched the trees and their leaves turned emerald, and he looked upon the sea, and it's waters be- came as sapphire, and so with color
 came beauty into the world.
 l It was this tfought-the birth of color,
 that Census made the theme of ball Hast night that In the poetry of it's i'm tion, rivalled any of the entertainments of the Arabian Nights entertainments. Rarely, if ever before, even in this city Iof brilliant and original carnival balls,
 has anything so gorgeous and so spec | tacular been seen. Wave on wave of
 color, barbaric flashing purple and crimson and gold wherever the eye lturned, kaleidoscopic minglings of eve Try hue of the rainbow that enchanted i the eye and broke to form into other
 combinations even more alluring, the
 whole gemmed with myriads of starry l lights, 1t was thing to enslave the
 senses and make one drunk on color. | The beginning of the ball was ushered | in with the darkness that is the fitted herald of mystery. As soon as the last gorgeously gowned dowager had taken her place in the boxes, and the last fiut- tering debutante in the call-out chairs | had settled down into breathless wait l ing, the great house was steeped in Egyptian darkness. Then from an up- per balcony great white searchlight travelled over to the stage and showed the first line of maskers, dressed from head to foot in violet. Violet were their faces, violet hair flowed from under vii olet caps, violet were their silken doub- | lets and trunks and hose, violet the shoes on their feet A little gasp of wonder and expectation ran through the audience, and then the calcium light | travelled on little further, and showed 1 the second squad of maskers, dressed
 exactly like the first except that their costumes were indigo, and then the light went on to the next group, who were in blue, and the next, who were in green, and the next in yellow, and the next, who wore orange, and the next,
 who were in red, thus typifying each of
 the primary colors.
 Then began the maskers' march, full
 of fantastic and beautiful figures, and
 in which the color scheme was still the
 dominant idea. Sometimes they formed
 a great wheel, each spoke radiating
 single hue; again they became circles,
 each of color that shifted and broke,
 and formed again in Kaleidoscope
 blending of hues that dazzled with their brilliance, or in great waving lines
 that looked like a variegated ribbon,
 they wound back and forth and back and forth again across the stage, in
 never ending blory of color, until at last they lnassed themselves in a solid pha- lanx in the middle of the stage, and
 then the great calcium light travelled across them, resting like a gorgeous tropical butterfly in the foreground, and
 over them and beyond to the back of the stage. where the instant it touched them two great suns flashed into life, and the whole of the exquisite pageant by which the birth of color was depicted
 becameNvisible.
 The whole of the great stage had been
 canopied in opaque black, to represent the thick darkness of a clear night At
 the back two suns. one fourteen feet and
 the other ten feet in diameter, and each
 with fourteen points studded with elec- tric light, revolving in opposite direc-
 tions, made flashing spendor of light
 that dazzled the eyes. The rays of the sun nearest the audience were of differ
 ent colors but the back one was simply
 golden glory, as were the innumera-
 ble stars each an electric light, that
 studded the canopy. There were thou sands of these, some used singly, others to represent comets, the Southern
 Cross Great Dipper and other constel- lations of the heavens, while across the prosceniun arch was a great rainbow,