s approved by the world's best
thought and in full harmony with the national scheme of order. We shall
see now what these things have to do with our strange true story.

In New Orleans the American public school system, which recognizes free
public instruction as a profitable investment of the public funds for the
common public safety, had already long been established. The negro adopted
and enlarged it. He recognized the fact that the relation of pupils in the
public schools is as distinctly a public and not a private relation as
that of the sidewalk, the market, the public park, or the street-car. But
recognizing also the impracticabilities of place and time, he established
separate schools for whites and blacks. In one instance, however, owing
mainly to smallness of numbers, it seemed more feasible to allow a common
enjoyment of the civil right of public instruction without separation by
race than to maintain two separate schools, one at least of which would be
very feeble for lack of numbers. Now, it being so decided, of all the
buildings in New Orleans which one was chosen for this experiment but the
"haunted house" in Royal street!

I shall never forget the day--although marked by no startling
incident--when I sat in its lofty drawing-rooms and heard its classes in
their annual examination. It was June, and the teachers and pupils were
clad in recognition of the special occasion and in the light fabrics
fitted to the season. The rooms were adorned with wreaths, garlands, and
bouquets. Among the scholars many faces were beautiful, and all were fresh
and young. Much Gallic blood asserted itself in complexion and feature,
generally of undoubted, unadulterated "Caucasian" purity, but sometimes of
visible and now and then of preponderating African tincture. Only two or
three, unless I have forgotten, were of pure negro blood. There, in the
rooms that had once resounded with the screams of Madame Lalaurie's little
slave fleeing to her death, and with the hootings and maledictions of the
enraged mob, was being tried the experiment of a common enjoyment of
public benefits by the daughters of two widely divergent races, without
the enforcement of private social companionship.

From such enforcement the school was as free as any school is or ought to
be. The daily discipline did not require any two pupils to be social, but
only every one to be civil, and civil to all. These pages are written,
however, to tell a strange tru