he depths of those overflowed
forests, near and far down their lofty gray colonnades, the dwarfed
swamp-maple drooped the winged fruit of its limp bush in pink and
flame-yellow and rose-red masses until it touched its own image in the
still flood.

That which is now only the "sixth district" of greater New Orleans was
then the small separate town of Carrollton. There the vast Mississippi,
leaving the sugar and rice fields of St. Charles and St. John Baptist
parishes and still seeking the Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to south
before it sweeps northward and southeast again to give to the Creole
capital its graceful surname of the "Crescent City." Mile-wide, brimful,
head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could easily
have seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to be eighteen feet
high and broad in proportion. So swollen was the flood that from any
deck of a steamboat touching there one might have looked down upon the
whole fair still suburb.

Widely it hovered in its nest of rose gardens, orange groves, avenues of
water-oaks, and towering moss-draped pecans. A few hundred yards from
the levee a slender railway, coming from the city, with a highway on
either side, led into its station-house; but mainly the eye would have
dwelt on that which filled the interval between the nearer high road and
the levee--the "Carrollton Gardens."

At a corner of these grounds closest to the railway station stood a
quiet hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a step to the centre
of a sunny shell-paved court where two fountains danced and tinkled to
each other. Along its farther bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row of
small tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled.
By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk
lured on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled,
crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower to bower.
Out of sight in there the loiterer came at startling moments face to
face with banks of splendid bloom in ravishing negligee--Diana disrobed,
as it were, while that untiring sensation-hunter, the mocking-bird,
leaped and sang and clapped his wings in a riot of scandalous mirth.

In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat an old
gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran of
the Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He sat
quite alone, in fine dress