window. The story of some lads, whose words in ordinary statements were
worthless, was generally credited, that the night they camped in the
woods, rather than pass the place after dark, they saw, about sunset,
every window blood-red, and on each of the four chimneys an owl sitting,
which turned his head three times round, and moaned and laughed with a
human voice. There was a bottomless well, everybody professed to know,
beneath the sill of the big front door under the rotten veranda; whoever
set his foot upon that threshold disappeared forever in the depth below.

What wonder the marsh grew as wild as Africa! Take all the Faubourg Ste.
Marie, and half the ancient city, you would not find one graceless
dare-devil reckless enough to pass within a hundred yards of the house
after nightfall.

* * * * *

The alien races pouring into old New Orleans began to find the few
streets named for the Bourbon princes too strait for them. The wheel of
fortune, beginning to whirl, threw them off beyond the ancient
corporation lines, and sowed civilization and even trade upon the lands
of the Graviers and Girods. Fields became roads, roads streets.
Everywhere the leveller was peering through his glass, rodsmen were
whacking their way through willow-brakes and rose-hedges, and the
sweating Irishmen tossed the blue clay up with their long-handled
shovels.

"Ha! that is all very well," quoth the Jean-Baptistes, fueling the
reproach of an enterprise that asked neither co-operation nor advice of
them, "but wait till they come yonder to Jean Poquelin's marsh; ha! ha!
ha!" The supposed predicament so delighted them, that they put on a mock