e office of the "Texan Expedition," held at the "Moon," a
great coffee-house on the Quay, impressed me most favorably with the
respectability and pretensions of my "Co-expeditionaries." Old
Kit presented me to the secretary--a very knavish-looking fellow in
spectacles of black gauze--as the winner of the great prize, which, to
my excessive mortification, I learned was at Houston, about eighty miles
farther up the Bay.

I apologized for my careless dress by stating that my baggage had been
unfortunately left behind at New Orleans, and that in my haste I had
been obliged to come on board with actually nothing but the few dollars
I had in my pocket.

"That's a misfortune easily repaired, sir," said the gauze-eyed
secretary; "you can have your 'credit' cashed here just as liberally as
at any town in the country."

"I have no doubt of that," responded I, somewhat tartly, for I did not
fancy this allusion to banks and bankers; "but all my papers are in my
portmanteau."

"Provoking, certainly," said he, taking a long pinch of snuff,--"ain't
it, Kit?"

But Kit only scratched his nose, and looked puzzled.

"Are your bankers Vicars and Bull, sir?"

"No," said I, "my credits are all on a Northern house; but I fancy my
name is tolerably well known. You 've heard of the Cregans, I suppose."

"Cregan--Cregan," repeated he a couple of times; then, opening a
huge ledger at the letter C, ran his eye down a long column.
"Crabtree--Crossley--Croxam--Crebell--Creffet--Cregmore. It is not
Cregmore, sir?"

"No, Cregan is the name."

"Ah, well, there's no Cregan. There was a Cregmore was 'lynched' here,
I see by the mark in the book, and we have a small trunk waiting to be
claimed, belonging to him."

"That ain't the fellow as purtended to be winner of the wagon team that
was lotteried here a twelvemonth since, is it?" said Kit.

"Yes, but it is, though. He made out he had the ticket all right and
straight, when up comes one Colonel Jabus Harper, and showed the real
thing; and the chaps took it up hotly, and they lynched Cregmore that
evening."

"Yes, sir, that's a fact," quoth Kit.

"What was the penalty?" asked I, with a most imposing indifference.

"They hanged him up at Hall's Court yonder. I ain't sure if he be n't
hanging there still."

"And this packet," said I, for the theme was excessively distasteful,
"when does she sail?"

"She starts to-night at twelve,--first cabin, two dollars; steerage,
one-twenty."

"