from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court
decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the old
newspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasure
speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions
to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in
those days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a
steamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded
in ten lines of colorless statement. I went to the courts, and, after
following and abandoning several false trails through two days' search,
found that the books of record containing the object of my quest had been
lost, having unaccountably disappeared in--if I remember aright--1870.

There was one chance left: it was to find the original papers. I employed
an intelligent gentleman at so much a day to search till he should find
them. In the dusty garret of one of the court buildings--the old Spanish
Cabildo, that faces Jackson Square--he rummaged for ten days, finding now
one desired document and now another, until he had gathered all but one.
Several he drew out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of the
floor, as if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found. Yet I
was content. Through the perseverance of this gentleman and the
intervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the courtesy of
the court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story of the poor lost
and found Salome Müller. How through the courtesy of some of the
reportorial staff of the "New Orleans Picayune" I found and conversed with
three of Salome's still surviving relatives and friends, I shall not stop
to tell.

While I was still in search of these things, the editor of the "New
Orleans Times-Democrat" handed me a thick manuscript, asking me to examine
and pronounce upon its merits. It was written wholly in French, in a