--oh, De Grapion, says I! their name is
Nancanou. They are, without exception, the finest women--the brightest,
the best, and the bravest--that I know in New Orleans." The doctor
resumed a cigar which lay against the edge of the chess-board, found it
extinguished, and proceeded to relight it. "Best blood of the province;
good as the Grandissimes. Blood is a great thing here, in certain odd
ways," he went on. "Very curious sometimes." He stooped to the floor
where his coat had fallen, and took his handkerchief from a
breast-pocket. "At a grand mask ball about two months ago, where I had a
bewilderingly fine time with those ladies, the proudest old turkey in
the theater was an old fellow whose Indian blood shows in his very
behavior, and yet--ha, ha! I saw that same old man, at a quadroon ball a
few years ago, walk up to the handsomest, best dressed man in the
house, a man with a skin whiter than his own,--a perfect gentleman as to
looks and manners,--and without a word slap him in the face."

"You laugh?" asked Frowenfeld.

"Laugh? Why shouldn't I? The fellow had no business there. Those balls
are not given to quadroon _males_, my friend. He was lucky to get out
alive, and that was about all he did.

"They are right!" the doctor persisted, in response to Frowenfeld's
puzzled look. "The people here have got to be particular. However, that
is not what we were talking about. Quadroon balls are not to be
mentioned in connection. Those ladies--" He addressed himself to the
resuscitation of his cigar. "Singular people in this country," he
resumed; but his cigar would not revive. He was a poor story-teller. To
Frowenfeld--as it would have been to any one, except a Creole or the
most thoroughly Creoleized Americain--his narrative, when it was done,
was little more than a thick mist of strange names, places and events;
yet there shone a light of romance upon it that filled it with color and
populated it with phantoms. Frowenfeld's interest rose--was allured into
this mist--and there was left befogged. As a physician, Doctor Keene
thus accomplished his end,--the mental diversion of his late
patient,--for in the midst of the mist Frowenfeld encountered and
grappled a problem of human life in Creole type, the possible
correlations of whose quantities we shall presently find him revolving
in a studious and sympathetic mind, as the poet of to-day ponders the

"Flower in the crannied wall."

The quantities in that problem wer