S WIFE.

In former times the presence in New Orleans, during the cooler half of
the year, of large numbers of mercantile men from all parts of the
world, who did not accept the fever-plagued city as their permanent
residence, made much business for the renters of furnished apartments.
At the same time there was a class of persons whose residence was
permanent, and to whom this letting of rooms fell by an easy and natural
gravitation; and the most respectable and comfortable rented rooms of
which the city could boast were those _chambres garnies_ in Custom-house
and Bienville streets, kept by worthy free or freed mulatto or quadroon
women.

In 1856 the gala days of this half-caste people were quite over.
Difference was made between virtue and vice, and the famous quadroon
balls were shunned by those who aspired to respectability, whether their
whiteness was nature or only toilet powder. Generations of domestic
service under ladies of Gallic blood had brought many of them to a
supreme pitch of excellence as housekeepers. In many cases money had
been inherited; in other cases it had been saved up. That Latin feminine
ability to hold an awkward position with impregnable serenity, and, like
the yellow Mississippi, to give back no reflection from the overhanging
sky, emphasized this superior fitness. That bright, womanly business
ability that comes of the same blood added again to their excellence.
Not to be home itself, nothing could be more like it than were the
apartments let by Madame Cecile, or Madame Sophie, or Madame Athalie,
or Madame Polyxene, or whatever the name might be.

It was in one of these houses, that presented its dull brick front
directly upon the sidewalk of Custom-house street, with the unfailing
little square sign of _Chambres a louer_ (Rooms to let), dangling by a
string from the overhanging balcony and twirling in the breeze, that
the sick wife lay. A waiting slave-girl opened the door as the two men
approached it, and both of them went directly upstairs and into a large,
airy room. On a high, finely carved, and heavily hung mahogany bed,
to which the remaining furniture corresponded in ancient style and
massiveness, was stretched the form of a pale, sweet-faced little woman.

The proprietress of the house was sitting beside the bed,--a quadroon of
good, kind face, forty-five years old or so, tall and broad. She rose
and responded to the Doctor's silent bow with that pretty dignity of
greeting w