-up shadowy river windings, over
linked brightnesses of lake and lakelet, through many a green
glimmering bayou,--to the Creole city, and laid her to rest somewhere
in the old Saint-Louis Cemetery. And upon the tablet recording her
name were also graven the words--

.....................

Aussi a la memoire de
son mari;

JULIEN RAYMOND LA BRIERRE,
ne a la paroisse St. Landry,
le 29 Mai; MDCCCXXVIII;
et de leur fille,
EULALIE,
agee de 4 as et 5 mois,--
Qui tous perirent
dans la grande tempete qui
balaya L'Ile Derniere, le
10 Aout, MDCCCLVI
..... + .....
Priez pour eux!

VII.

Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen again
upon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight of him, as
at a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless the apparition cast
a shadow. People paused, approached, half extended a hand through old
habit, suddenly checked themselves and passed on,--wondering they
should have forgotten, asking themselves why they had so nearly made an
absurd mistake.

It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our snowless
Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen
in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass;--and in
that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and
gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year had
passed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,--in that
strange colonial columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behind
squared marbles lettered in black or bronze. Yet her
resting-place,--in the highest range,--already seemed old. Under our
Southern sun, the vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into being
spontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life! Microscopic
mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in;--over
its face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feet
into the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soil
below speckled euphorbias were growing up to her,--and morning
glories,--and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not know
the name.

And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson pouches in
the sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting their color when
approached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the caravans of the ants,
journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;--the bees gathering
honey fr