twice-told tale. The history of the house is known to thousands in the old
French quarter, and that portion which antedates the late war was told in
brief by Harriet Martineau as far back as when she wrote her book of
American travel. In printing it here I fulfill an oft-repeated promise;
for many a one has asked me if I would not, or, at least, why I did not,
tell its dark story.

So I have inventoried my entire exhibit--save one small matter. It turned
out after, all that the dear old Creole lady who had sold us the ancient
manuscript, finding old paper commanding so much more per ton than it ever
had commanded before, raked together three or four more leaves--stray
chips of her lovely little ancestress Françoise's workshop, or rather the
shakings of her basket of cherished records,--to wit, three Creole African
songs, which I have used elsewhere; one or two other scraps, of no value;
and, finally, a long letter telling its writer's own short story--a story
so tragic and so sad that I can only say pass it, if you will. It stands
first because it antedates the rest. As you will see, its time is
something more than a hundred years ago. The writing was very difficult to
read, owing entirely to the badness--mainly the softness--of the paper. I
have tried in vain to find exactly where Fort Latourette was situated. It
may have had but a momentary existence in Galvez's campaign against the
English. All along the Gulf shore the sites and remains of the small forts
once held by the Spaniards are known traditionally and indiscriminately as
"Spanish Fort." When John Law,--author of that famed Mississippi Bubble,
which was in Paris what the South Sea Bubble was in London,--failed in his
efforts at colonization on the Arkansas, his Arkansas settlers came down
the Mississippi to within some sixty miles of New Orleans and established
themselves in a colony at first called the _Côte Allemande_ (German
Coast), and later, owing to its prosperity, the _Côte d'Or_, or Golden
Coast. Thus the banks of the Mississippi became known on the Rhine, a