corrugated roof of dull red tiles, sloping down toward you with an
inward curve, is overgrown with weeds, and in the fall of the year is
gay with the yellow plumes of the golden-rod. You can almost touch with
your cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging eaves. The batten
shutters at door and window, with hinges like those of a postern, are
shut with a grip that makes one's knuckles and nails feel lacerated.
Save in the brick-work itself there is not a cranny. You would say the
house has the lock-jaw. There are two doors, and to each a single
chipped and battered marble step. Continuing on down the sidewalk, on a
line with the house, is a garden masked from view by a high, close
board-fence. You may see the tops of its fruit-trees--pomegranate,
peach, banana, fig, pear, and particularly one large orange, close by
the fence, that must be very old.

The residents over the narrow way, who live in a three-story house,
originally of much pretension, but from whose front door hard times have
removed almost all vestiges of paint, will tell you:

"Yass, de 'ouse is in'abit; 'tis live in."

And this is likely to be all the information you get--not that they
would not tell, but they cannot grasp the idea that you wish to
know--until, possibly, just as you are turning to depart, your
informant, in a single word and with the most evident non-appreciation
of its value, drops the simple key to the whole matter:

"Dey's quadroons."

He may then be aroused to mention the better appearance of the place in
former years, when the houses of this region generally stood farther
apart, and that garden comprised the whole square.

Here dwelt, sixty years ago and more, one Delphine Carraze; or, as she
was commonly designated by the few who knew her, Madame Delphine. That
she owned her home, and that it had been given her by the then deceased
companion of her days of beauty, were facts so generally admitted as to
be, even as far back as that sixty years ago, no longer a subject of
gossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens of the quarter as a
character, nor her house as a "feature." It would have passed all Creole
powers of guessing to divine what you could find worthy of inquiry
concerning a retired quadroon woman; and not the least puzzled of all
would have been the timid and restive Madame Delphine herself.

CHAPTER II.

MADAME DELPHINE.

During the first quarter of the present century, the free quadroon caste
of