was a voudou
malediction.

"_Nous sommes grigis!_" screamed two or three ladies, "we are
bewitched!"

"Look to your wives and daughters!" shouted a Brahmin-Mandarin.

"Shoot the black devils without mercy!" cried a Mandarin-Fusilier,
unconsciously putting into a single outflash of words the whole Creole
treatment of race troubles.

With a single bound Bras-Coupe reached the drawing-room door; his gaudy
regimentals made a red and blue streak down the hall; there was a rush
of frilled and powdered gentlemen to the rear veranda, an avalanche of
lightning with Bras-Coupe in the midst making for the swamp, and then
all without was blackness of darkness and all within was a wild
commingled chatter of Creole, French, and Spanish tongues,--in the midst
of which the reluctant Agricola returned his dresssword to its scabbard.

While the wet lanterns swung on crazily in the trees along the way by
which the bridegroom was to have borne his bride; while Madame
Grandissime prepared an impromptu bridalchamber; while the Spaniard
bathed his eye and the blue gash on his cheek-bone; while Palmyre paced
her room in a fever and wild tremor of conflicting emotions throughout
the night, and the guests splashed home after the storm as best they
could, Bras-Coupe was practically declaring his independence on a slight
rise of ground hardly sixty feet in circumference and lifted scarce
above the water in the inmost depths of the swamp.

And amid what surroundings! Endless colonnades of cypresses; long,
motionless drapings of gray moss; broad sheets of noisome waters, pitchy
black, resting on bottomless ooze; cypress knees studding the surface;
patches of floating green, gleaming brilliantly here and there; yonder
where the sunbeams wedge themselves in, constellations of water-lilies,
the many-hued iris, and a multitude of flowers that no man had named;
here, too, serpents great and small, of wonderful colorings, and the
dull and loathsome moccasin sliding warily off the dead tree; in dimmer
recesses the cow alligator, with her nest hard by; turtles a century
old; owls and bats, raccoons, opossums, rats, centipedes and creatures
of like vileness; great vines of beautiful leaf and scarlet fruit in
deadly clusters; maddening mosquitoes, parasitic insects, gorgeous
dragon-flies and pretty water-lizards: the blue heron, the snowy crane,
the red-bird, the moss-bird, the night-hawk and the chuckwill's-widow; a
solemn stillness and stifled air on