oula" and "calinda"--and sinister spells were
cast. Later the voudous went to more secluded spots on the shores of
Lake Pontchartrain, and on St. John's Eve, which is their great
occasion, many of the whites of the city used to go to the lake in hopes
of discovering a voudou seance, and being allowed to see it. A friend of
mine, who has seen several of these seances, says that they are
unbelievably weird and horrible. They will make a gombo, put a snake in
it, and then devour it, and they will wring a cat's neck and drink its
blood. And of course, along with these loathsome ceremonies, go
incantations, chants, dances, and frenzies, sometimes ending in
catalepsis.

There are weird stories of white women of good family who have believed
in voudou, and have taken part in the rites; and there are other tales
of evil spells, such as that of the Creole bride of long ago, whose
affianced had been the lover of a quadroon girl, a hairdresser. The
hairdresser when she came to do the bride's hair for the wedding, gave
her a bouquet of flowers. The bride smelled the bouquet--and died at the
church door.

It was, I think, in an old book store on Royal Street--or else on
Chartres--that I found the tattered guide book to which I referred in an
earlier chapter. It was "edited and compiled by several leading writers
of the New Orleans Press," and published in 1885, and it contains an
introductory recommendation by George W. Cable--which is about the
finest guarantee that a book on New Orleans can have.

Mr. Cable, of course, more than all the rest of the people who have
written of New Orleans put together, placed the city definitely in
literature. And it is interesting, if somewhat saddening, to recall that
for lifting the city into the world of belles lettres, for adorning it
and preserving it in such volumes as "Old Creole Days," "The
Grandissimes," "Madame Delphine," and other valuable, truthful, and
charming works, he was roundly abused by his own fellow-townsmen. Far
from attacking Mr. Cable, New Orleans ought to build him a monument, and
I am glad to say that, though the monument is not there yet, the city
does seem to have come to its senses, and that the prophet is no longer
without honor in his own country.

Some further leaves are added to the literary laurels of the city by
what Thomas Bailey Aldrich has written of it, and the wreath is made the
greater by the fact that in New Orleans was born "the only literary man
in N