It stood aloof from civilization, the tracts that had once been its
indigo fields given over to their first noxious wildness, and grown up
into one of the horridest marshes within a circuit of fifty miles.

The house was of heavy cypress, lifted up on pillars, grim, solid, and
spiritless, its massive build a strong reminder of days still earlier,
when every man had been his own peace officer and the insurrection of
the blacks a daily contingency. Its dark, weatherbeaten roof and sides
were hoisted up above the jungly plain in a distracted way, like a
gigantic ammunition-wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some
retreating army. Around it was a dense growth of low water willows, with
half a hundred sorts of thorny or fetid bushes, savage strangers alike
to the "language of flowers" and to the botanist's Greek. They were hung
with countless strands of discolored and prickly smilax, and the
impassable mud below bristled with _chevaux de frise_ of the dwarf
palmetto. Two lone forest-trees, dead cypresses, stood in the centre of
the marsh, dotted with roosting vultures. The shallow strips of water
were hid by myriads of aquatic plants, under whose coarse and spiritless
flowers, could one have seen it, was a harbor of reptiles, great and
small, to make one shudder to the end of his days.

The house was on a slightly raised spot, the levee of a draining canal.
The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of
big, ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers.

Such was the home of old Jean Marie Poquelin, once an opulent indigo
planter, standing high in the esteem of his small, proud circle of
exclusively male acquaintances in the old city; now a hermit, alike
shunned by and shunning all who had ever known him. "The last of his
line," said the gossips. His father lies under the floor of the St.