a terrible lesson,--a
lasting lesson,--which taught her the value of obedience.

She had been particularly cautioned not to venture into a certain part
of the swamp in the rear of the grove, where the weeds were very tall;
for Carmen was afraid some snake might bite the child.

But Chita's bird-bright eye had discerned a gleam of white in that
direction; and she wanted to know what it was. The white could only be
seen from one point, behind the furthest house, where the ground was
high. "Never go there," said Carmen; "there is a Dead Man there,--will
bite you!" And yet, one day, while Carmen was unusually busy, Chita
went there.

In the early days of the settlement, a Spanish fisherman had died; and
his comrades had built him a little tomb with the surplus of the same
bricks and other material brought down the bayou for the construction
of Viosca's cottages. But no one, except perhaps some wandering duck
hunter, had approached the sepulchre for years. High weeds and grasses
wrestled together all about it, and rendered it totally invisible from
the surrounding level of the marsh.

Fiddlers swarmed away as Chita advanced over the moist soil, each
uplifting its single huge claw as it sidled off;--then frogs began to
leap before her as she reached the thicker grass;--and long-legged
brown insects sprang showering to right and left as she parted the
tufts of the thickening verdure. As she went on, the bitter-weeds
disappeared;--jointed grasses and sinewy dark plants of a taller growth
rose above her head: she was almost deafened by the storm of insect
shrilling, and the mosquitoes became very wicked. All at once
something long and black and heavy wriggled almost from under her naked
feet,--squirming so horribly that for a minute or two she could not
move for fright. But it slunk away somewhere, and hid itself; the weeds
it had shaken ceased to tremble in its wake; and her courage returned.
She felt such an exquisite and fearful pleasure in the gratification of
that naughty curiosity! Then, quite unexpectedly--oh! what a start it
gave her!--the solitary white object burst upon her view, leprous and
ghastly as the yawn of a cotton-mouth. Tombs ruin soon in
Louisiana;--the one Chita looked upon seemed ready to topple down.
There was a great ragged hole at one end, where wind and rain, and
perhaps also the burrowing of crawfish and of worms, had loosened the
bricks, and caused them to slide out of place. It seemed