shedded pens of swine, sheep, beeves, cows, calves, and mustang ponies.
The plank footways were enclosed by stout rails to guard against the
chargings of long-horned cattle chased through the thoroughfares by
lasso-whirling "bull-drivers" as wild as they. In the middle of the
river-front was a ferry, whence Louisiana Avenue, broad, treeless,
grassy, and thinly lined with slaughter-houses, led across the plain.
Down this untidy plaisance a grimy little street-car, every half-hour,
jogged out to the Carrollton railway and returned. This street and the
water-front were lighted--twilighted--with lard-oil lamps; the rest of
the place was dark. At each of the two corners facing the ferry was a
"coffee-house"--dram-shop, that is to say.

Messrs. Sam Gibbs and Maxime Lafontaine were president and
vice-president of that Patriots' League against whose machinations our
two young men had been warned by the detectives in St. Charles Street.
They had just now arrived at the Stock-Landing. Naturally, on so
important an occasion they were far from sober; yet on reaching the spot
they had lost no time in levying on a Gascon butcher for a bucket of tar
and a pillow of feathers, on an Italian luggerman for a hurried supper
of raw oysters, and on the keeper of one of the "coffee-houses" for
drinks for the four.

"Us four and no more!" sang the gleeful Gibbs; right number to manage a
delicate case. The four glasses emptied, he had explained that all
charges must be collected, of course, from the alien gentleman for whom
the plumage and fixative were destined. Hence a loud war of words, which
the barkeeper had almost smoothed out when the light-hearted Gibbs
suddenly decreed that the four should sing, march, pat and "cut the
pigeon-wing" to the new song (given nightly by Christy's Minstrels)
entitled "Dixie's Land."