s, he came up, with his usually
careless motion, and giving Eva a quarter of the orange he was eating,
said,

"Well, Cousin Vermont, I suppose you are all ready."

"I've been ready, waiting, nearly an hour," said Miss Ophelia; "I began
to be really concerned about you.

"That's a clever fellow, now," said he. "Well, the carriage is waiting,
and the crowd are now off, so that one can walk out in a decent and
Christian manner, and not be pushed and shoved. Here," he added to a
driver who stood behind him, "take these things."

"I'll go and see to his putting them in," said Miss Ophelia.

"O, pshaw, cousin, what's the use?" said St. Clare.

"Well, at any rate, I'll carry this, and this, and this," said Miss
Ophelia, singling out three boxes and a small carpet-bag.

"My dear Miss Vermont, positively you mustn't come the Green Mountains
over us that way. You must adopt at least a piece of a southern
principle, and not walk out under all that load. They'll take you for a
waiting-maid; give them to this fellow; he'll put them down as if they
were eggs, now."

Miss Ophelia looked despairingly as her cousin took all her treasures
from her, and rejoiced to find herself once more in the carriage with
them, in a state of preservation.

"Where's Tom?" said Eva.

"O, he's on the outside, Pussy. I'm going to take Tom up to mother for
a peace-offering, to make up for that drunken fellow that upset the
carriage."

"O, Tom will make a splendid driver, I know," said Eva; "he'll never get
drunk."

The carriage stopped in front of an ancient mansion, built in that odd
mixture of Spanish and French style, of which there are specimens in
some parts of New Orleans. It was built in the Moorish fashion,--a
square building enclosing a court-yard, into which the carriage drove
through an arched gateway. The court, in the inside, had evidently
been arranged to gratify a picturesque and voluptuous ideality. Wide
galleries ran all around the four sides, whose Moorish arches, slender
pillars, and arabesque ornaments, carried the mind back, as in a dream,
to the reign of oriental romance in Spain. In the middle of the court, a
fountain threw high its silvery water, falling in a never-ceasing spray
into a marble basin, fringed with a deep border of fragrant violets. The
water in the fountain, pellucid as crystal, was alive with myriads of
gold and silver fishes, twinkling and darting through it like so many
living jewels. Around the foun