use kill the beauty of a moss-grown centurion of an oak with a
history as old as the city? Can an iron bridge with tarantula piers
detract from the song of a mocking-bird in a fragrant orange grove? We
know that farther out, past the Confederate Soldiers' Home,--that
rose-embowered, rambling place of gray-coated, white-haired old men
with broken hearts for a lost cause,--it flows, unimpeded by the
faintest conception of man, and we love it all the more that, like the
Priestess of Isis, it is calm-browed, even in indignity.

To its banks at the end of Moss Street, one day there came a man and a
maiden. They were both tall and lithe and slender, with the agility of
youth and fire. He was the final concentration of the essence of
Spanish passion filtered into an American frame; she, a repressed
Southern exotic, trying to fit itself into the niches of a modern
civilisation. Truly, a fitting couple to seek the bayou banks.

They climbed the levee that stretched a feeble check to waters that
seldom rise, and on the other side of the embankment, at the brink of
the river, she sat on a log, and impatiently pulled off the little cap
she wore. The skies were gray, heavy, overcast, with an occasional
wind-rift in the clouds that only revealed new depths of grayness
behind; the tideless waters murmured a faint ripple against the logs
and jutting beams of the breakwater, and were answered by the crescendo
wail of the dried reeds on the other bank,--reeds that rustled and
moaned among themselves for the golden days of summer sunshine.

He stood up, his dark form a slender silhouette against the sky; she
looked upward from her log, and their eyes met with an exquisite shock
of recognising understanding; dark eyes into dark eyes, Iberian fire
into Iberian fire, soul unto soul: it was enough. He sat down and took
her into his arms, and in the eerie murmur of the storm coming they
talked of the future.

"And then I hope to go to Italy or France. It is only there, beneath
those far Southern skies, that I could ever hope to attain to anything
that the soul within me says I can. I have wasted so much time in the
mere struggle for bread, while the powers of a higher calling have
clamoured for recognition and expression. I will go some day and
redeem myself."

She was silent a moment, watching with half-closed lids a
dejected-looking hunter on the other bank, and a lean dog who trailed
through the reeds behind him with drooping