CHAPTER I.


AN OLD HOUSE.

A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to
and across Canal Street, the central avenue of the city, and to that
corner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of the
arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant
merchandise. The crowd--and if it is near the time of the carnival it
will be great--will follow Canal Street.

But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover of
Creole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone to
call the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a few
auction-rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize that
you have left behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchants
before you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, where
an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories,
overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon every
thing has settled down a long sabbath of decay. The vehicles in the
street are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are
shrunken into shops; you see here and there, like a patch of bright
mould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many great
doors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many street
windows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten,
and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the older
Franco-Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor almost oriental.