or the boulevards, or
even the fragrant parks, where life flows in a fair, placid stream. Some
there must be who toil by day in shop, or at counter, or in dim
accounting-rooms, or on the floors of the marts where fortunes are made
and lost in sugar or cotton or rice. For such the gallery is a haven of
rest. If they must pass the earlier day indoors, for them the gallery
during the long, late afternoon, and the ghost of a twilight, and the
long evenings far into the starry night. The ghost of a twilight
indeed--the South knows no other. Sometimes I have watched the long,
splendid twilight come down over the wild Canadian forest--slowly
delaying; creeping up the low mountains; halting from hour to hour in
the glades below; shade after shade in the glorious sky of the west
gradually merging into the dimness of the oncoming dusk; the moments
passing so slowly, the day fading so elusively, until, at last, when
even the low moon has hung out its silver sign in the west and the stars
are pricking through, it is still twilight along the lower earth. And
still farther to the north, around the globe in the far upper Europe,
with the polar circle below you, it is like living on a planet of
eternal day to sit through the northern light and feel about you the
all-pervasive twilight of the land of the midnight sun. But the night is
so hasty here, and the day is swift; and between them runs but a
slender, dim thread.

[Illustration: OLD PLANTATION VILLA ON ANNUNCIATION STREET.]

The gallery is a feature of every house in this city that lives
outdoors, be it big or little, humble or grand, or lowly or mean. It is
on the first floor or the second, or even the third, though the third it
seldom reaches, for few people care for houses of great height. Indeed,
there are hundreds of homes of but one story, full of the costliest
tokens of the taste of an artistic people. And the soil below is so like
a morass that ample space must be left between floor and earth; while as
for cellars, I have heard of but two in all the great city. The
gallery may run around the entire house, flanked and set off by splendid
pillars with capitals rich and ornate; it may run across one end of the
residence and be a marvel of rich ironwork, as fine as art and
handicraft can make it, with, mayhap, the figures of its field outlined
in some bit of color, as gold or green; it may be but a single cheap
wooden affair, paintless, dingy, dilapidated, weather-worn, and