their course up
the shore of the Mississippi (almost due south), and broke into a lively
gallop on the Tchoupitoulas road, which in those days skirted that
margin of the river nearest the sunsetting, namely, the _eastern_ bank.

Conversation moved sluggishly for a time, halting upon trite topics or
swinging easily from polite inquiry to mild affirmation, and back again.
They were men of thought, these two, and one of them did not fully
understand why he was in his present position; hence some reticence. It
was one of those afternoons in early March that make one wonder how the
rest of the world avoids emigrating to Louisiana in a body.

"Is not the season early?" asked Frowenfeld.

M. Grandissime believed it was; but then the Creole spring always seemed
so, he said.

The land was an inverted firmament of flowers. The birds were an
innumerable, busy, joy-compelling multitude, darting and fluttering
hither and thither, as one might imagine the babes do in heaven. The
orange-groves were in blossom; their dark-green boughs seemed snowed
upon from a cloud of incense, and a listening ear might catch an
incessant, whispered trickle of falling petals, dropping "as the
honey-comb." The magnolia was beginning to add to its dark and shining
evergreen foliage frequent sprays of pale new leaves and long, slender,
buff buds of others yet to come. The oaks, both the bare-armed and the
"green-robed senators," the willows, and the plaqueminiers, were putting
out their subdued florescence as if they smiled in grave participation
with the laughing gardens. The homes that gave perfection to this beauty
were those old, large, belvidered colonial villas, of which you may
still here and there see one standing, battered into half ruin, high and
broad, among foundries, cotton-and tobacco-sheds, junk-yards, and
longshoremen's hovels, like one unconquered elephant in a wreck of
artillery. In Frowenfeld's day the "smell of their garments was like
Lebanon." They were seen by glimpses through chance openings in lofty
hedges of Cherokee-rose or bois-d'arc, under boughs of cedar or
pride-of-China, above their groves of orange or down their long,
overarched avenues of oleander; and the lemon and the pomegranate, the
banana, the fig, the shaddock, and at times even the mango and the
guava, joined "hands around" and tossed their fragrant locks above the
lilies and roses. Frowenfeld forgot to ask himself further concerning
the probable intent of M. Gr