stopped me one day in Carondelet street, New Orleans, saying, "I have a
true story that I want you to tell. You can dress it out--"

I arrested him with a shake of the head. "Dress me no dresses. Story me no
stories. There's not one of a hundred of them that does not lack something
essential, for want of which they are good for naught. Keep them for
after-dinner chat; but for the novelist they are good to smell, not to
eat. And yet--tell me your story. I have a use for it--a cabinet of true
things that have never had and shall not have a literary tool lifted up
against them; virgin shells from the beach of the sea of human events. It
may be I shall find a place for it there." So he told me the true story
which I have called "Attalie Brouillard," because, having forgotten the
woman's real name, it pleased his fancy to use that name in recounting the
tale: "Attalie Brouillard." I repeated the story to a friend, a gentleman
of much reading.

His reply dismayed me. "I have a faint impression," he said, "that you
will find something very much like that in one of Lever's novels."

But later I thought, "Even so, what then? Good stories repeat themselves."
I remembered having twice had experiences in my own life the accounts of
which, when given, would have been great successes only that they were old
anecdotes--great in their day, but long worn out in the club-rooms and
abandoned to clergymen's reunions. The wise thing was not to find out or
care whether Lever had somewhere told something like it, but whether the
story was ever a real event in New Orleans, and, if so, to add it to my
now, to me, priceless collection. Meeting the young judge again, I asked
boldly for the story's full authentication. He said promptly that the man
who told it of his own knowledge was the late Judge T. Wharton Collins;
that the incidents occurred about 1855, and that Judge McCaleb could