tted through the bushes,
and dewberries grew ripe beneath. Over all these came a sweet, dry smell
of salubrity which the place had not known since the sediments of the
Mississippi first lifted it from the sea.

But its owner did not build. Over the willow-brakes, and down the vista
of the open street, bright new houses, some singly, some by ranks, were
prying in upon the old man's privacy. They even settled down toward his
southern side. First a wood-cutter's hut or two, then a market
gardener's shanty, then a painted cottage, and all at once the faubourg
had flanked and half surrounded him and his dried-up marsh.

Ah! then the common people began to hate him. "The old tyrant!" "You
don't mean an old _tyrant_?" "Well, then, why don't he build when the
public need demands it? What does he live in that unneighborly way for?"
"The old pirate!" "The old kidnapper!" How easily even the most ultra
Louisianians put on the imported virtues of the North when they could be
brought to bear against the hermit. "There he goes, with the boys after
him! Ah! ha! ha! Jean-ah Poquelin! Ah! Jean-ah! Aha! aha! Jean-ah Marie!
Jean-ah Poquelin! The old villain!" How merrily the swarming Americains
echo the spirit of persecution! "The old fraud," they say--"pretends to
live in a haunted house, does he? We'll tar and feather him some day.
Guess we can fix him."

He cannot be rowed home along the old canal now; he walks. He has broken
sadly of late, and the street urchins are ever at his heels. It is like
the days when they cried: "Go up, thou bald-head," and the old man now
and then turns and delivers ineffectual curses.

To the Creoles--to the incoming lower class of superstitious Germans,
Irish, Sicilians, and others--he became an omen and embodiment of public
and private ill-fortune. Upon him all the vagaries of their
superstitions gathered and grew. If a house caught fire, it was imputed
to his machinations. Did a woman go off in a fit, he had bewitched her.
Did a child stray off for an hour, the mother shivered with the
apprehension that Jean Poquelin had offered him to strange gods. The
house was the subject of every bad boy's invention who loved to contrive
ghostly lies. "As long as that house stands we shall have bad luck. Do
you not see our pease and beans dying, our cabbages and lettuce going to
seed and our gardens turning to dust, while every day you can see it
raining in the woods? The rain will never pass old Poquelin's house.