dans la grande tempete qui
balaya L'Ile Derniere, le
10 Aout, MDCCCLVI
..... + .....
Priez pour eux!


VII.

Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen
again upon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight
of him, as at a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless
the apparition cast a shadow. People paused, approached, half
extended a hand through old habit, suddenly checked themselves
and passed on,--wondering they should have forgotten, asking
themselves why they had so nearly made an absurd mistake.

It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our
snowless Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and
outlines sharpen in the light as if viewed through the focus of a
diamond glass;--and in that brightness Julien La Brierre perused
his own brief epitaph, and gazed upon the sculptured name of
drowned Adele. Only half a year had passed since she was laid
away in the high wall of tombs,--in that strange colonial
columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behind squared marbles
lettered in black or bronze. Yet her resting-place,--in the
highest range,--already seemed old. Under our Southern sun, the
vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into being
spontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life!
Microscopic mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that