orrowful as an exile. Its
enormous trunk is nothing but an agglomeration of knots and bumps,
which each passing year seems to have deposited there as a mark of
age, and as a protection against the blows of time and of the world.

Inquire for its origin, and every one will tell you that it has stood
there from time immemorial. A sort of vague but impressive mystery is
attached to it, and it is as superstitiously respected as one of the
old oaks of Dodona. Bold would be the axe that would strike the first
blow at that foreign patriarch; and if it were prostrated to the
ground by a profane hand, what native of the city would not mourn
over its fall, and brand the act as an unnatural and criminal deed?
So, long live the date-tree of Orleans street--that time-honored
descendant of Asiatic ancestors!

In the beginning of 1727, a French vessel of war landed at New Orleans
a man of haughty mien, who wore the Turkish dress, and whose whole
attendance was a single servant. He was received by the governor with
the highest distinction, and was conducted by him to a small but
comfortable house with a pretty garden, then existing at the corner of
Orleans and Dauphine streets, and which, from the circumstance of its
being so distant from other dwellings, might have been called a rural
retreat, although situated in the limits of the city. There the
stranger, who was understood to be a prisoner of state, lived in the
greatest seclusion; and although neither he nor his attendant could be
guilty of indiscretion, because none understood their language, and
although Governor Perier severely rebuked the slightest inquiry, yet
it seemed to be the settled conviction in Louisiana, that the
mysterious stranger was a brother of the Sultan, or some great
personage of the Ottoman empire, who had fled from the anger of the
vicegerent of Mohammed, and who had taken refuge in France.

The Sultan had peremptorily demanded the fugitive, and the French
government, thinking it derogatory to its dignity to comply with that
request, but at the same time not wishing to expose its friendly
relations with the Moslem monarch, and perhaps desiring for political
purposes, to keep in hostage the important guest it had in its hands,
had recourse to the expedient of answering that he had fled to
Louisiana, which was so distant a country, that it might be looked
upon as the grave, where, as it was suggested, the fugitive might be
suffered to wait in peace for actu