schooner. By shrewdness, dogged
industry and some little luck, he made "Long's" the best known and
richest house in the South-west, until in the crash of '37 it
threatened to topple down forever. Then Mr. Staple came forward with
his great credit and large amount of spare capital, saved the house and
went into it himself; while Middling, the former clerk of all work, was
promoted, for fidelity in the trying times, to a small partnership.

Like all the heavy cotton men of the South, Mr. Staple believed firmly
that cotton was king, and that the first steamer into a southern port
would bring a French and British minister.

"It's against our interest for the present to do so," he said,
confidently; "but my partner and I have advised all our planters to
hold their cotton instead of shipping it, that the market may not be
glutted when the foreign ships come in. And, yet, sir, it's coming down
now faster than ever. Everybody prefers, in the disorganized state of
things, to have ready money for cotton, that in three months' time must
be worth from twenty to thirty cents!"

"Hard to believe, sir, isn't it? Yet our planters, looking at things
from their own contracted standpoint, think the English and French
cabinets will defer recognition of our Government. As for 'the house,'
sir, it will put all it possesses into the belief that they can not
prove so blind!"

Like most of the wealthy men in New Orleans, Mr. Staple had a
charmingly located villa a mile from the lake and drove out every
evening, after business hours, to pass the night.

"Not that I fear the fever," he explained. "What strangers regard as
such certain death is to us scarce more than the agues of a North
Carolina flat. 'Yellow Jack' is a terrible scourge, indeed, to the
lower classes, and to those not acclimatized. The heavy deposits of
vegetable drift from the inundations leave the whole country for miles
coated four or five inches deep in creamy loam. This decomposes most
rapidly upon the approach of hot weather, and the action of the dews,
when they begin to fall upon it, causes the _miasmata_ to rise in dense
and poisonous mists. Now these, of course, are as bad in country--except
in very elevated localities--as in town; but they are only _dangerous_
in crowded sections, or to the enervated constitutions that could as
ill resist any other disease."

"You astonish me, indeed," I answered. "For I have always classed
yellow fever and cholera as twin destr