Dr. Sevier

CHAPTER XXV.
THE DOCTOR DINES OUT

On the third day after these incidents, again at the sunset hour, but in a very different part of the town, Dr. Sevier sat down, a guest, at dinner. There were flowers; there was painted and monogrammed china; there was Bohemian glass; there was silver of cunning work with linings of gold, and damasked linen, and oak of fantastic carving. There were ladies in summer silks and elaborate coiffures; the hostess, small, slender, gentle, alert; another, dark, flashing, Roman, tall; another, ripe but not drooping, who had been beautiful, now, for thirty years; and one or two others. There were jewels; there were sweet odors. And there were, also, some good masculine heads: Dr. Sevier’s, for instance; and the chief guest’s, – an iron-gray, with hard lines in the face, and a scar on the near cheek, – a colonel of the regular army passing through from Florida; and one crown, bald, pink, and shining, encircled by a silken fringe of very white hair: it was the banker who lived in St. Mary street. His wife was opposite. And there was much high-bred grace. There were tall windows thrown wide to make the blaze of gas bearable, and two tall mulattoes in the middle distance bringing in and bearing out viands too sumptuous for any but a French nomenclature.

It was what you would call a quiet affair; quite out of season, and difficult to furnish with even this little handful of guests; but it was a proper and necessary attention to the colonel; conversation not too dull, nor yet too bright for ease, but passing gracefully from one agreeable topic to another without earnestness, a restless virtue, or frivolity, which also goes against serenity. Now it touched upon the prospects of young A. B. in the demise of his uncle; now upon the probable seriousness of C. D. in his attentions to E. F.; now upon G.’s amusing mishaps during a late tour in Switzerland, which had – “how unfortunately!” – got into the papers. Now it was concerning the admirable pulpit manners and easily pardoned vocal defects of a certain new rector. Now it turned upon Stephen A. Douglas’s last speech; passed to the questionable merits of a new-fangled punch; and now, assuming a slightly explanatory form from the gentlemen to the ladies, showed why there was no need whatever to fear a financial crisis – which came soon afterward.

The colonel inquired after an old gentleman whom he had known in earlier days in Kentucky.

“It’s many a year since I met him,” he said. “The proudest man I ever saw. I understand he was down here last season.”

“He was,” replied the host, in a voice of native kindness, and with a smile on his high-fed face. “He was; but only for a short time. He went back to his estate. That is his world. He’s there now.”

“It used to be considered one of the finest places in the State,” said the colonel.

“It is still,” rejoined the host. “Doctor, you know him?”

“I think not,” said Dr. Sevier; but somehow he recalled the old gentleman in button gaiters, who had called on him one evening to consult him about his sick wife.

“A good man,” said the colonel, looking amused; “and a superb gentleman. Is he as great a partisan of the church as he used to be?”

“Greater! Favors an established church of America.”

The ladies were much amused. The host’s son, a young fellow with sprouting side-whiskers, said he thought he could be quite happy with one of the finest plantations in Kentucky, and let the church go its own gait.

“Humph!” said the father; “I doubt if there’s ever a happy breath drawn on the place.”

“Why, how is that?” asked the colonel, in a cautious tone.

“Hadn’t he heard?” The host was surprised, but spoke low. “Hadn’t he heard about the trouble with their only son? Why, he went abroad and never came back!”

Every one listened.

“It’s a terrible thing,” said the hostess to the ladies nearest her; “no one ever dares ask the family what the trouble is, – they have such odd, exclusive ideas about their matters being nobody’s business. All that can be known is that they look upon him as worse than dead and gone forever.”

“And who will get the estate?” asked the banker.

“The two girls. They’re both married.”

“They’re very much like their father,” said the hostess, smiling with gentle significance.

“Very much,” echoed the host, with less delicacy. “Their mother is one of those women who stand in terror of their husband’s will. Now, if he were to die and leave her with a will of her own she would hardly know what to do with it – I mean with her will – or the property either.”

The hostess protested softly against so harsh a speech, and the son, after one or two failures, got in his remark: —

“Maybe the prodigal would come back and be taken in.”

But nobody gave this conjecture much attention. The host was still talking of the lady without a will.

“Isn’t she an invalid?” Dr. Sevier had asked.

“Yes; the trip down here last season was on her account, – for change of scene. Her health is wretched.”

“I’m distressed that I didn’t call on her,” said the hostess; “but they went away suddenly. My dear, I wonder if they really did encounter the young man here?”

“Pshaw!” said the husband, softly, smiling and shaking his head, and turned the conversation.

In time it settled down with something like earnestness for a few minutes upon a subject which the rich find it easy to discuss without the least risk of undue warmth. It was about the time when one of the graciously murmuring mulattoes was replenishing the glasses, that remark in some way found utterance to this effect, – that the company present could congratulate themselves on living in a community where there was no poor class.

“Poverty, of course, we see; but there is no misery, or nearly none,” said the ambitious son of the host.

Dr. Sevier differed with him. That was one of the Doctor’s blemishes as a table guest: he would differ with people.

“There is misery,” he said; “maybe not the gaunt squalor and starvation of London or Paris or New York; the climate does not tolerate that, – stamps it out before it can assume dimensions; but there is at least misery of that sort that needs recognition and aid from the well-fed.”

The lady who had been beautiful so many years had somewhat to say; the physician gave attention, and she spoke: —

“If sister Jane were here, she would be perfectly triumphant to hear you speak so, Doctor.” She turned to the hostess, and continued: “Jane is quite an enthusiast, you know; a sort of Dorcas, as husband says, modified and readapted. Yes, she is for helping everybody.”

“Whether help is good for them or not,” said the lady’s husband, a very straight and wiry man with a garrote collar.

“It’s all one,” laughed the lady. “Our new rector told her plainly, the other day, that she was making a great mistake; that she ought to consider whether assistance assists. It was really amusing. Out of the pulpit and off his guard, you know, he lisps a little; and he said she ought to consider whether ‘aththithtanth aththithtth.’”

There was a gay laugh at this, and the lady was called a perfect and cruel mimic.

“‘Aththithtanth aththithtth!’” said two or three to their neighbors, and laughed again.

“What did your sister say to that?” asked the banker, bending forward his white, tonsured head, and smiling down the board.

“She said she didn’t care; that it kept her own heart tender, anyhow. ‘My dear madam,’ said he, ‘your heart wants strengthening more than softening.’ He told her a pound of inner resource was more true help to any poor person than a ton of assistance.”

The banker commended the rector. The hostess, very sweetly, offered her guarantee that Jane took the rebuke in good part.

“She did,” replied the time-honored beauty; “she tried to profit by it. But husband, here, has offered her a wager of a bonnet against a hat that the rector will upset her new schemes. Her idea now is to make work for those whom nobody will employ.”

“Jane,” said the kind-faced host, “really wants to do good for its own sake.”

“I think she’s even a little Romish in her notions,” said Jane’s wiry brother-in-law. “I talked to her as plainly as the rector. I told her, ‘Jane, my dear, all this making of work for the helpless poor is not worth one-fiftieth part of the same amount of effort spent in teaching and training those same poor to make their labor intrinsically marketable.’”

“Yes,” said the hostess; “but while we are philosophizing and offering advice so wisely, Jane is at work – doing the best she knows how. We can’t claim the honor even of making her mistakes.”

“’Tisn’t a question of honors to us, madam,” said Dr. Sevier; “it’s a question of results to the poor.”

The brother-in-law had not finished. He turned to the Doctor.

“Poverty, Doctor, is an inner condition” —

“Sometimes,” interposed the Doctor.

“Yes, generally,” continued the brother-in-law, with some emphasis. “And to give help you must, first of all, ‘inquire within’ – within your beneficiary.”

“Not always, sir,” replied the Doctor; “not if they’re sick, for instance.” The ladies bowed briskly and applauded with their eyes. “And not always if they’re well,” he added. His last words softened off almost into soliloquy.

The banker spoke forcibly: —

“Yes, there are two quite distinct kinds of poverty. One is an accident of the moment; the other is an inner condition of the individual” —

“Of course it is,” said sister Jane’s brother-in-law, who felt it a little to have been contradicted on the side of kindness by the hard-spoken Doctor. “Certainly! it’s a deficiency of inner resources or character, and what to do with it is no simple question.”

“That’s what I was about to say,” resumed the banker; “at least, when the poverty is of that sort. And what discourages kind people is that that’s the sort we commonly see. It’s a relief to meet the other, Doctor, just as it’s a relief to a physician to encounter a case of simple surgery.”

“And – and,” said the brother-in-law, “what is your rule about plain almsgiving to the difficult sort?”

“My rule,” replied the banker, “is, don’t do it. Debt is slavery, and there is an ugly kink in human nature that disposes it to be content with slavery. No, sir; gift-making and gift-taking are twins of a bad blood.” The speaker turned to Dr. Sevier for approval; but, though the Doctor could not gainsay the fraction of a point, he was silent. A lady near the hostess stirred softly both under and above the board. In her private chamber she would have yawned. Yet the banker spoke again: —

“Help the old, I say. You are pretty safe there. Help the sick. But as for the young and strong, – now, no man could be any poorer than I was at twenty-one, – I say be cautious how you smooth that hard road which is the finest discipline the young can possibly get.”

“If it isn’t too hard,” chirped the son of the host.

“Too hard? Well, yes, if it isn’t too hard. Still I say, hands off; you needn’t turn your back, however.” Here the speaker again singled out Dr. Sevier. “Watch the young man out of one corner of your eye; but make him swim!”

“Ah-h!” said the ladies.

“No, no,” continued the banker; “I don’t say let him drown; but I take it, Doctor, that your alms, for instance, are no alms if they put the poor fellow into your debt and at your back.”

“To whom do you refer?” asked Dr. Sevier. Whereat there was a burst of laughter, which was renewed when the banker charged the physician with helping so many persons, “on the sly,” that he couldn’t tell which one was alluded to unless the name were given.

“Doctor,” said the hostess, seeing it was high time the conversation should take a new direction, “they tell me you have closed your house and taken rooms at the St. Charles.”

“For the summer,” said the physician.

As, later, he walked toward that hotel, he went resolving to look up the Richlings again without delay. The banker’s words rang in his ears like an overdose of quinine: “Watch the young man out of one corner of your eye. Make him swim. I don’t say let him drown.”

“Well, I do watch him,” thought the Doctor. “I’ve only lost sight of him once in a while.” But the thought seemed to find an echo against his conscience, and when it floated back it was: “I’ve only caught sight of him once in a while.” The banker’s words came up again: “Don’t put the poor fellow into your debt and at your back.” “Just what you’ve done,” said conscience. “How do you know he isn’t drowned?” He would see to it.

While he was still on his way to the hotel he fell in with an acquaintance, a Judge Somebody or other, lately from Washington City. He, also, lodged at the St. Charles. They went together. As they approached the majestic porch of the edifice they noticed some confusion at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the rotunda; cabmen and boys were running to a common point, where, in the midst of a small, compact crowd, two or three pairs of arms were being alternately thrown aloft and brought down. Presently the mass took a rapid movement up St. Charles street.

The judge gave his conjecture: “Some poor devil resisting arrest.”

Before he and the Doctor parted for the night they went to the clerk’s counter.

“No letters for you, Judge; mail failed. Here is a card for you, Doctor.”

The Doctor received it. It had been furnished, blank, by the clerk to its writer.

John Richling

At the door of his own room, with one hand on the unturned knob and one holding the card, the Doctor stopped and reflected. The card gave no indication of urgency. Did it? It was hard to tell. He didn’t want to look foolish; morning would be time enough; he would go early next morning.

But at daybreak he was summoned post-haste to the bedside of a lady who had stayed all summer in New Orleans so as not to be out of this good doctor’s reach at this juncture. She counted him a dear friend, and in similar trials had always required close and continual attention. It was the same now.

Dr. Sevier scrawled and sent to the Richlings a line, saying that, if either of them was sick, he would come at their call. When the messenger returned with word from Mrs. Riley that both of them were out, the Doctor’s mind was much relieved. So a day and a night passed in which he did not close his eyes.

The next morning, as he stood in his office, hat in hand, and a finger pointing to a prescription on his desk, which he was directing Narcisse to give to some one who would call for it, there came a sudden hurried pounding of feminine feet on the stairs, a whiff of robes in the corridor, and Mary Richling rushed into his presence all tears and cries.

“O Doctor! – O Doctor! O God, my husband! my husband! O Doctor, my husband is in the Parish Prison!” She sank to the floor.

The Doctor raised her up. Narcisse hurried forward with his hands full of restoratives.

“Take away those things,” said the Doctor, resentfully. “Here! – Mrs. Richling, take Narcisse’s arm and go down and get into my carriage. I must write a short note, excusing myself from an appointment, and then I will join you.”

Mary stood alone, turned, and passed out of the office beside the young Creole, but without taking his proffered arm. Did she suspect him of having something to do with this dreadful affair?

“Missez Witchlin,” said he, as soon as they were out in the corridor, “I dunno if you goin’ to billiv me, but I boun’ to tell you that nodwithstanning that yo’ ’uzban’ is displease’ with me, an’ nodwithstanning ’e’s in that calaboose, I h’always fine ’im a puffic gen’leman – that Mistoo Itchlin, – an’ I’ll sweah ’e is a gen’leman!”

She lifted her anguished eyes and looked into his beautiful face. Could she trust him? His little forehead was as hard as a goat’s, but his eyes were brimming with tears, and his chin quivered. As they reached the head of the stairs he again offered his arm, and she took it, moaning softly, as they descended: —

“O John! O John! O my husband, my husband!”

CHAPTER XXVI.
THE TROUGH OF THE SEA

Narcisse, on receiving his scolding from Richling, had gone to his home in Casa Calvo street, a much greater sufferer than he had appeared to be. While he was confronting his abaser there had been a momentary comfort in the contrast between Richling’s ill-behavior and his own self-control. It had stayed his spirit and turned the edge of Richling’s sharp denunciations. But, as he moved off the field, he found himself, at every step, more deeply wounded than even he had supposed. He began to suffocate with chagrin, and hurried his steps in sheer distress. He did not experience that dull, vacant acceptance of universal scorn which an unresentful coward feels. His pangs were all the more poignant because he knew his own courage.

In his home he went so straight up to the withered little old lady, in the dingiest of flimsy black, who was his aunt, and kissed her so passionately, that she asked at once what was the matter. He recounted the facts, shedding tears of mortification. Her feeling, by the time he had finished the account, was a more unmixed wrath than his, and, harmless as she was, and wrapped up in her dear, pretty nephew as she was, she yet demanded to know why such a man shouldn’t be called out upon the field of honor.

“Ah!” cried Narcisse, shrinkingly. She had touched the core of the tumor. One gets a public tongue-lashing from a man concerning money borrowed; well, how is one going to challenge him without first handing back the borrowed money? It was a scalding thought! The rotten joists beneath the bare scrubbed-to-death floor quaked under Narcisse’s to-and-fro stride.

“ – And then, anyhow!” – he stopped and extended both hands, speaking, of course, in French, – “anyhow, he is the favored friend of Dr. Sevier. If I hurt him – I lose my situation! If he hurts me – I lose my situation!”

He dried his eyes. His aunt saw the insurmountability of the difficulty, and they drowned feeling in an affectionate glass of green-orangeade.

“But never mind!” Narcisse set his glass down and drew out his tobacco. He laughed spasmodically as he rolled his cigarette. “You shall see. The game is not finished yet.”

Yet Richling passed the next day and night without assassination, and on the second morning afterward, as on the first, went out in quest of employment. He and Mary had eaten bread, and it had gone into their life without a remainder either in larder or purse. Richling was all aimless.

“I do wish I had the art of finding work,” said he. He smiled. “I’ll get it,” he added, breaking their last crust in two. “I have the science already. Why, look you, Mary, the quiet, amiable, imperturbable, dignified, diurnal, inexorable haunting of men of influence will get you whatever you want.”

“Well, why don’t you do it, dear? Is there any harm in it? I don’t see any harm in it. Why don’t you do that very thing?”

“I’m telling you the truth,” answered he, ignoring her question. “Nothing else short of overtowering merit will get you what you want half so surely.”

“Well, why not do it? Why not?” A fresh, glad courage sparkled in the wife’s eyes.

“Why, Mary,” said John, “I never in my life tried so hard to do anything else as I’ve tried to do that! It sounds easy; but try it! You can’t conceive how hard it is till you try it. I can’t do it! I can’t do it!”

“I’d do it!” cried Mary. Her face shone. “I’d do it! You’d see if I didn’t! Why, John” —

“All right!” exclaimed he; “you sha’n’t talk that way to me for nothing. I’ll try it again! I’ll begin to-day!”

“Good-by,” he said. He reached an arm over one of her shoulders and around under the other and drew her up on tiptoe. She threw both hers about his neck. A long kiss – then a short one.

“John, something tells me we’re near the end of our troubles.”

John laughed grimly. “Ristofalo was to get back to the city to-day: maybe he’s going to put us out of our misery. There are two ways for troubles to end.” He walked away as he spoke. As he passed under the window in the alley, its sash was thrown up and Mary leaned out on her elbows.

“John!”

“Well?”

They looked into each other’s eyes with the quiet pleasure of tried lovers, and were silent a moment. She leaned a little farther down, and said, softly: —

“You mustn’t mind what I said just now.”

“Why, what did you say?”

“That if it were I, I’d do it. I know you can do anything I can do, and a hundred better things besides.”

He lifted his hand to her cheek. “We’ll see,” he whispered. She drew in, and he moved on.

Morning passed. Noon came. From horizon to horizon the sky was one unbroken blue. The sun spread its bright, hot rays down upon the town and far beyond, ripening the distant, countless fields of the great delta, which by and by were to empty their abundance into the city’s lap for the employment, the nourishing, the clothing of thousands. But in the dusty streets, along the ill-kept fences and shadowless walls of the quiet districts, and on the glaring façades and heated pavements of the commercial quarters, it seemed only as though the slowly retreating summer struck with the fury of a wounded Amazon. Richling was soon dust-covered and weary. He had gone his round. There were not many men whom he could even propose to haunt. He had been to all of them. Dr. Sevier was not one. “Not to-day,” said Richling.

“It all depends on the way it’s done,” he said to himself; “it needn’t degrade a man if it’s done the right way.” It was only by such philosophy he had done it at all. Ristofalo he could have haunted without effort; but Ristofalo was not to be found. Richling tramped in vain. It may be that all plans were of equal merit just then. The summers of New Orleans in those times were, as to commerce, an utter torpor, and the autumn reawakening was very tardy. It was still too early for the stirrings of general mercantile life. The movement of the cotton crop was just beginning to be perceptible; but otherwise almost the only sounds were from the hammers of craftsmen making the town larger and preparing it for the activities of days to come.

The afternoon wore along. Not a cent yet to carry home! Men began to shut their idle shops and go to meet their wives and children about their comfortable dinner-tables. The sun dipped low. Hammers and saws were dropped into tool-boxes, and painters pulled themselves out of their overalls. The mechanic’s rank, hot supper began to smoke on its bare board; but there was one board that was still altogether bare and to which no one hastened. Another day and another chance of life were gone.

Some men at a warehouse door, the only opening in the building left unclosed, were hurrying in a few bags of shelled corn. Night was falling. At an earlier hour Richling had offered the labor of his hands at this very door and had been rejected. Now, as they rolled in the last truck-load, they began to ask for rest with all the gladness he would have felt to be offered toil, singing, —

“To blow, to blow, some time for to blow.”

They swung the great leaves of the door together as they finished their chorus, stood grouped outside a moment while the warehouseman turned the resounding lock, and then went away. Richling, who had moved on, watched them over his shoulder, and as they left turned back. He was about to do what he had never done before. He went back to the door where the bags of grain had stood. A drunken sailor came swinging along. He stood still and let him pass; there must be no witnesses. The sailor turned the next corner. Neither up nor down nor across the street, nor at dust-begrimed, cobwebbed window, was there any sound or motion. Richling dropped quickly on one knee and gathered hastily into his pocket a little pile of shelled corn that had leaked from one of the bags.

That was all. No harm to a living soul; no theft; no wrong; but ah! as he rose he felt a sudden inward lesion. Something broke. It was like a ship, in a dream, noiselessly striking a rock where no rock is. It seemed as though the very next thing was to begin going to pieces. He walked off in the dark shadow of the warehouse, half lifted from his feet by a vague, wide dismay. And yet he felt no greatness of emotion, but rather a painful want of it, as if he were here and emotion were yonder, down-street, or up-street, or around the corner. The ground seemed slipping from under him. He appeared to have all at once melted away to nothing. He stopped. He even turned to go back. He felt that if he should go and put that corn down where he had found it he should feel himself once more a living thing of substance and emotions. Then it occurred to him – no, he would keep it, he would take it to Mary; but himself – he would not touch it; and so he went home.

Mary parched the corn, ground it fine in the coffee-mill and salted and served it close beside the candle. “It’s good white corn,” she said, laughing. “Many a time when I was a child I used to eat this in my playhouse and thought it delicious. Didn’t you? What! not going to eat?”

Richling had told her how he got the corn. Now he told his sensations. “You eat it, Mary,” he said at the end; “you needn’t feel so about it; but if I should eat it I should feel myself a vagabond. It may be foolish, but I wouldn’t touch it for a hundred dollars.” A hundred dollars had come to be his synonyme for infinity.

Mary gazed at him a moment tearfully, and rose, with the dish in her hand, saying, with a smile, “I’d look pretty, wouldn’t I!”

She set it aside, and came and kissed his forehead. By and by she asked: —

“And so you saw no work, anywhere?”

“Oh, yes!” he replied, in a tone almost free from dejection. “I saw any amount of work – preparations for a big season. I think I certainly shall pick up something to-morrow – enough, anyhow, to buy something to eat with. If we can only hold out a little longer – just a little – I am sure there’ll be plenty to do – for everybody.” Then he began to show distress again. “I could have got work to-day if I had been a carpenter, or if I’d been a joiner, or a slater, or a bricklayer, or a plasterer, or a painter, or a hod-carrier. Didn’t I try that, and was refused?”

“I’m glad of it,” said Mary.

“‘Show me your hands,’ said the man to me. I showed them. ‘You won’t do,’ said he.”

“I’m glad of it!” said Mary, again.

“No,” continued Richling; “or if I’d been a glazier, or a whitewasher, or a wood-sawyer, or” – he began to smile in a hard, unpleasant way, – “or if I’d been anything but an American gentleman. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t get the work!”

Mary sank into his lap, with her very best smile.

“John, if you hadn’t been an American gentleman” —

“We should never have met,” said John. “That’s true; that’s true.” They looked at each other, rejoicing in mutual ownership.

“But,” said John, “I needn’t have been the typical American gentleman, – completely unfitted for prosperity and totally unequipped for adversity.”

“That’s not your fault,” said Mary.

“No, not entirely; but it’s your calamity, Mary. O Mary! I little thought” —

She put her hand quickly upon his mouth. His eye flashed and he frowned.

“Don’t do so!” he exclaimed, putting the hand away; then blushed for shame, and kissed her.

They went to bed. Bread would have put them to sleep. But after a long time —

“John,” said one voice in the darkness, “do you remember what Dr. Sevier told us?”

“Yes, he said we had no right to commit suicide by starvation.”

“If you don’t get work to-morrow, are you going to see him?”

“I am.”

In the morning they rose early.

During these hard days Mary was now and then conscious of one feeling which she never expressed, and was always a little more ashamed of than probably she need have been, but which, stifle it as she would, kept recurring in moments of stress. Mrs. Riley – such was the thought – need not be quite so blind. It came to her as John once more took his good-by, the long kiss and the short one, and went breakfastless away. But was Mrs. Riley as blind as she seemed? She had vision enough to observe that the Richlings had bought no bread the day before, though she did overlook the fact that emptiness would set them astir before their usual hour of rising. She knocked at Mary’s inner door. As it opened a quick glance showed the little table that occupied the centre of the room standing clean and idle.

“Why, Mrs. Riley!” cried Mary; for on one of Mrs. Riley’s large hands there rested a blue-edged soup-plate, heaping full of the food that goes nearest to the Creole heart —jambolaya. There it was, steaming and smelling, – a delicious confusion of rice and red pepper, chicken legs, ham, and tomatoes. Mike, on her opposite arm, was struggling to lave his socks in it.

“Ah!” said Mrs. Riley, with a disappointed lift of the head, “ye’re after eating breakfast already! And the plates all tleared off. Well, ye air smairt! I knowed Mr. Richlin’s taste for jumbalie” —

Mary smote her hands together. “And he’s just this instant gone! John! John! Why, he’s hardly” – She vanished through the door, glided down the alley, leaned out the gate, looking this way and that, tripped down to this corner and looked – “Oh! oh!” – no John there – back and up to the other corner – “Oh! which way did John go?” There was none to answer.

Hours passed; the shadows shortened and shrunk under their objects, crawled around stealthily behind them as the sun swung through the south, and presently began to steal away eastward, long and slender. This was the day that Dr. Sevier dined out, as hereinbefore set forth.

The sun set. Carondelet street was deserted. You could hear your own footstep on its flags. In St. Charles street the drinking-saloons and gamblers’ drawing-rooms, and the barber-shops, and the show-cases full of shirt-bosoms and walking-canes, were lighted up. The smell of lemons and mint grew finer than ever. Wide Canal street, out under the darkling crimson sky, was resplendent with countless many-colored lamps. From the river the air came softly, cool and sweet. The telescope man set up his skyward-pointing cylinder hard by the dark statue of Henry Clay; the confectioneries were ablaze and full of beautiful life, and every little while a great, empty cotton-dray or two went thundering homeward over the stony pavements until the earth shook, and speech for the moment was drowned. The St. Charles, such a glittering mass in winter nights, stood out high and dark under the summer stars, with no glow except just in its midst, in the rotunda; and even the rotunda was well-nigh deserted The clerk at his counter saw a young man enter the great door opposite, and quietly marked him as he drew near.