ayou St. Jean, or, by night, into the
common obscurity of a starlit perspective. When an unclouded moon shone
upon it, it cast a shadow as black as velvet.

Under this fig-tree, some three hours later than that at which Honore
bade Joseph good-night, a man was stooping down and covering something
with the broad, fallen leaves.

"The moon will rise about three o'clock," thought he. "That, the hour of
universal slumber, will be, by all odds, the time most likely to bring
developments."

He was the same person who had spent the most of the day in a
blacksmith's shop in St. Louis street, superintending a piece of
smithing. Now that he seemed to have got the thing well hid, he turned
to the base of the tree and tried the security of some attachment. Yes,
it was firmly chained. He was not a robber; he was not an assassin; he
was not an officer of police; and what is more notable, seeing he was a
Louisianian, he was not a soldier nor even an ex-soldier; and this
although, under his clothing, he was encased from head to foot in a
complete suit of mail. Of steel? No. Of brass? No. It was all one
piece--_a white skin_; and on his head he wore an invisible helmet--the
name of Grandissime. As he straightened up and withdrew into the grove,
you would have recognized at once--by his thick-set, powerful frame,
clothed seemingly in black, but really, as you might guess, in blue
cottonade, by his black beard and the general look of a seafarer--a
frequent visitor at the Grandissime mansion, a country member of that
great family, one whom we saw at the _fete de grandpere_.

Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime was a man of few words, no
sentiments, short methods; materialistic, we might say; quietly
ferocious; indifferent as to means, positive as to ends, quick of
perception, sure in matters of saltpetre, a stranger at the
custom-house, and altogether--_take him right_--very much of a
gentleman. He had been, for a whole day, beset with the idea that the
way to catch a voudou was--to catch him; and as he had caught numbers of
them on both sides of the tropical and semi-tropical Atlantic, he
decided to try his skill privately on the one who--his experience told
him--was likely to visit Agricola's doorstep to-night. All things being
now prepared, he sat down at the root of a tree in the grove, where the
shadow was very dark, and seemed quite comfortable. He did not strike at
the mosquitoes; they appeared to understand that he did not wish