parties changed the subject.

Some months passed and the street was opened. A canal was first dug
through the marsh, the small one which passed so close to Jean
Poquelin's house was filled, and the street, or rather a sunny road,
just touched a corner of the old mansion's dooryard. The morass ran dry.
Its venomous denizens slipped away through the bulrushes; the cattle
roaming freely upon its hardened surface trampled the superabundant
undergrowth. The bellowing frogs croaked to westward. Lilies and the
flower-de-luce sprang up in the place of reeds; smilax and poison-oak
gave way to the purple-plumed iron-weed and pink spiderwort; the
bindweeds ran everywhere blooming as they ran, and on one of the dead
cypresses a giant creeper hung its green burden of foliage and lifted
its scarlet trumpets. Sparrows and red-birds flitted through the bushes,
and dewberries grew ripe beneath. Over all these came a sweet, dry smell
of salubrity which the place had not known since the sediments of the
Mississippi first lifted it from the sea.

But its owner did not build. Over the willow-brakes, and down the vista
of the open street, bright new houses, some singly, some by ranks, were
prying in upon the old man's privacy. They even settled down toward his
southern side. First a wood-cutter's hut or two, then a market
gardener's shanty, then a painted cottage, and all at once the faubourg
had flanked and half surrounded him and his dried-up marsh.

Ah! then the common people began to hate him. "The old tyrant!" "You
don't mean an old _tyrant_?" "Well, then, why don't he build when the
public need demands it? What does he live in that unneighborly way for?"
"The old pirate!" "The old kidnapper!" How easily even the most ultra
Louisianians put on the imported virtues of the North when they could be