ust as the brighter glare of the set sun was growing dim above
the tops of the cypresses. After walking with some rapidity of step, he
had stopped aimlessly, and laid his hand with an air of weariness upon a
rotting China-tree that leaned over the ditch at the edge of the
unpaved walk.

"Setting in cypress," he murmured. We need not concern ourselves as to
his meaning.

One could think aloud there with impunity. In 1804, Canal street was
the upper boundary of New Orleans. Beyond it, to southward, the open
plain was dotted with country-houses, brick-kilns, clumps of live-oak
and groves of pecan. At the hour mentioned the outlines of these objects
were already darkening. At one or two points the sky was reflected from
marshy ponds. Out to westward rose conspicuously the old house and
willow-copse of Jean Poquelin. Down the empty street or road, which
stretched with arrow-like straightness toward the northwest, the
draining-canal that gave it its name tapered away between occasional
overhanging willows and beside broken ranks of rotting palisades, its
foul, crawling waters blushing, gilding and purpling under the swiftly
waning light, and ending suddenly in the black shadow of the swamp. The
observer of this dismal prospect leaned heavily on his arm, and cast his
glance out along the beautified corruption of the canal. His eye seemed
quickened to detect the smallest repellant details of the scene; every
cypress stump that stood in, or overhung, the slimy water; every ruined
indigo-vat or blasted tree, every broken thing, every bleached bone of
ox or horse--and they were many--for roods around. As his eye passed
them slowly over and swept back again around the dreary view, he sighed
heavily and said: "Dissolution," and then again--"Dissolution! order of
the day--"

A secret overhearer might have followed, by these occasional
exclamatory utterances, the course of a devouring trouble prowling up
and down through his thoughts, as one's eye tracks the shark by the
occasional cutting of his fin above the water.

He spoke again:

"It is in such moods as this that fools drown themselves."

His speech was French. He straightened up, smote the tree softly with
his palm, and breathed a long, deep sigh--such a sigh, if the very truth
be told, as belongs by right to a lover. And yet his mind did not
dwell on love.

He turned and left the place; but the trouble that was plowing hither
and thither through the deep of his meditat