LARD.

1855.

I.

FURNISHED ROOMS.

The strange true stories we have thus far told have all been matter of
public or of private record. Pages of history and travel, law reports,
documents of court, the testimony of eye-witnesses, old manuscripts and
letters, have insured to them the full force and charm of their reality.
But now we must have it clearly and mutually understood that here is one
the verity of which is vouched for stoutly, but only by tradition. It is
very much as if we had nearly finished a strong, solid stone house and
would now ask permission of our underwriters to add to it at the rear a
small frame lean-to.

It is a mere bit of lawyers' table-talk, a piece of after-dinner property.
It originally belonged, they say, to Judge Collins of New Orleans, as I
believe we have already mentioned; his by right of personal knowledge. I
might have got it straight from him had I heard of it but a few years
sooner. His small, iron-gray head, dark, keen eyes, and nervous face and
form are in my mind's eye now, as I saw him one day on the bench
interrupting a lawyer at the bar and telling him in ten words what the
lawyer was trying to tell in two hundred and fifty.

That the judge's right to this story was that of discovery, not of
invention, is well attested; and if he or any one else allowed fictitious
embellishments to gather upon it by oft telling of it in merry hours, the
story had certainly lost all such superfluities the day it came to me, as
completely as if some one had stolen its clothes while it was in swimming.
The best I can say is that it came unmutilated, and that I have done only
what any humane person would have done--given it drapery enough to cover
its nakedness.

To speak yet plainer, I do not, even now, put aside, abridge, or alter a
single _fact_; only, at most, restore one or two to spaces that indicate
just what has dropped out. If a dentist may lawfully supply the place of a
lost tooth, or an old beau comb his hair skillfully over a bald spot, then
am I guiltless. I make the tale not less, and only just a trifle more,
true; not more, but only a trifle less, strange. And this is it:

In 1855 this Attalie Brouillard--so called, mark you, for present
convenience only--lived in the French quarter of New Orleans; I think they
say in Bienville street, but that is no matter; somewhere in the _vieux
carre_ of Bienville's original town. She was a worthy woman; youngish,
honest, rather hand