man voice. There was a bottomless well, everybody professed to know,
beneath the sill of the big front door under the rotten veranda; whoever
set his foot upon that threshold disappeared forever in the depth below.

What wonder the marsh grew as wild as Africa! Take all the Faubourg Ste.
Marie, and half the ancient city, you would not find one graceless
dare-devil reckless enough to pass within a hundred yards of the house
after nightfall.

* * * * *

The alien races pouring into old New Orleans began to find the few
streets named for the Bourbon princes too strait for them. The wheel of
fortune, beginning to whirl, threw them off beyond the ancient
corporation lines, and sowed civilization and even trade upon the lands
of the Graviers and Girods. Fields became roads, roads streets.
Everywhere the leveller was peering through his glass, rodsmen were
whacking their way through willow-brakes and rose-hedges, and the
sweating Irishmen tossed the blue clay up with their long-handled
shovels.

"Ha! that is all very well," quoth the Jean-Baptistes, fueling the
reproach of an enterprise that asked neither co-operation nor advice of
them, "but wait till they come yonder to Jean Poquelin's marsh; ha! ha!
ha!" The supposed predicament so delighted them, that they put on a mock
terror and whirled about in an assumed stampede, then caught their
clasped hands between their knees in excess of mirth, and laughed till
the tears ran; for whether the street-makers mired in the marsh, or
contrived to cut through old "Jean-ah's" property, either event would be
joyful. Meantime a line of tiny rods, with bits of white paper in their
split tops, gradually extended its way straight through the haunted
ground, and across the canal diagonally.

"We shall fill that ditch," said the men in mud-boots, and brushed close
along the chained and padlocked gate of the haunted mansion. Ah, Jean-ah
Poquelin, those were not Creole boys, to be stampeded with a little hard
swearing.

He went to the Governor. That official scanned the odd figure with no
slight interest. Jean Poquelin was of short, broad frame, with a bronzed
leonine face. His brow was ample and deeply furrowed. His eye, large and
black, was bold and open like that of a war-horse, and his jaws shut
together with the firmness of iron. He was dressed in a suit of
Attakapas cottonade, and his shirt unbuttoned and thrown back from the
throat and bosom, sailor-w