on gray paper edged with
silver-gilt, and very highly scented. The penmanship was tiny, stilted
and ill-formed, as though the author were unused to writing, but I
could make it out:

_Adore

Meet me in St. Denis Cemetery at sunset
A vous de coeur pour l'eternite_

JULIE

"I stuffed the note back in my pocket. The more I thought about the
whole affair the less I liked it. The flirtation had begun harmlessly
enough, and Julie was as lovely and appealing as a figure in a
fairy-tale, but there are unpleasant aspects to most fairy-tales, and
this was no exception. That scene last night when she had seemed to
argue with a full-grown cottonmouth, and the mysterious appearance of
the snake whenever I spoke of breaking my promise to go back to
her--there was something too much like black magic in it. Now she
addressed me as her adored and signed herself for eternity; finally
named a graveyard as our rendezvous. Things had become a little bit
too thick.

"I was standing at the corner of Canal and Baronne Streets, and crowds
of office workers and late shoppers elbowed past me. 'I'll be damned
if I'll meet her in a cemetery, or anywhere else,' I muttered. 'I've
had enough of all this nonsense----'

"A woman's shrill scream, echoed by a man's hoarse shout of terror,
interrupted me. On the marble pavement of Canal Street, with half a
thousand people bustling by, lay coiled a three-foot water moccasin.
Here was proof. I'd seen it twice in my room at the hotel, but I'd
been alone each time. Some form of weird hypnosis might have made me
think I saw it, but the screaming woman and the shouting man, these
panic-stricken people in Canal Street, couldn't all be victims of a
spell which had been cast on me. 'All right, I'll go,' I almost
shouted, and instantly, as though it been but a puff of smoke, the
snake was gone, the half-fainting woman and a crowd of curious
bystanders asking what was wrong left to prove I had not been the
victim of some strange delusion.

* * * * *

"Old Saint Denis Cemetery lay drowsing in the blue, faint twilight. It
has no graves as we know them, for when the city was laid out it was
below sea-level and bodies were stored away in crypts set row on row
like lines of pigeon-holes in walls as thick as those of mediaeval
castles. Grass-grown aisles run between the rows of vaults, and the
effect is a true city of