a's delicious
February.

Among the throng were many whose names were going to be written large in
history. There was Casa Calvo,--Sebastian de Casa Calvo de la Puerta y
O'Farril, Marquis of Casa Calvo,--a man then at the fine age of
fifty-three, elegant, fascinating, perfect in Spanish courtesy and
Spanish diplomacy, rolling by in a showy equipage surrounded by a
clanking body-guard of the Catholic king's cavalry. There was young
Daniel Clark, already beginning to amass those riches which an age of
litigation has not to this day consumed; it was he whom the French
colonial prefect, Laussat, in a late letter to France, had extolled as a
man whose "talents for intrigue were carried to a rare degree of
excellence." There was Laussat himself, in the flower of his years, sour
with pride, conscious of great official insignificance and full of petty
spites--he yet tarried in a land where his beautiful wife was the "model
of taste." There was that convivial old fox, Wilkinson, who had plotted
for years with Miro and did not sell himself and his country to Spain
because--as we now say--"he found he could do better;" who modestly
confessed himself in a traitor's letter to the Spanish king as a man
"whose head may err, but whose heart cannot deceive!" and who brought
Governor Gayoso to an early death-bed by simply out-drinking him. There
also was Edward Livingston, attorney-at-law, inseparably joined to the
mention of the famous Batture cases--though that was later. There also
was that terror of colonial peculators, the old ex-Intendant Morales,
who, having quarrelled with every governor of Louisiana he ever saw, was
now snarling at Casa Calvo from force of habit.

And the Creoles--the Knickerbockers of Louisiana--but time would fail
us. The Villeres and Destrehans--patriots and patriots' sons; the De La
Chaise family in mourning for young Auguste La Chaise of
Kentuckian-Louisianian-San Domingan history; the Livaudaises, _pere et
fils_, of Haunted House fame, descendants of the first pilot of the
Belize; the pirate brothers Lafitte, moving among the best; Marigny de
Mandeville, afterwards the marquis member of Congress; the Davezacs, the
Mossys, the Boulignys, the Labatuts, the Bringiers, the De Trudeaus, the
De Macartys, the De la Houssayes, the De Lavilleboeuvres, the Grandpres,
the Forstalls; and the proselyted Creoles: Etienne de Bore (he was the
father of all such as handle the sugar-kettle); old man Pitot, who
became mayor