SEVIER.

CHAPTER I.

THE DOCTOR.

The main road to wealth in New Orleans has long been Carondelet
street. There you see the most alert faces; noses--it seems to
one--with more and sharper edge, and eyes smaller and brighter
and with less distance between them than one notices in other
streets. It is there that the stock and bond brokers hurry to and
fro and run together promiscuously--the cunning and the simple,
the headlong and the wary--at the four clanging strokes of the
Stock Exchange gong. There rises the tall facade of the Cotton
Exchange. Looking in from the sidewalk as you pass, you see its
main hall, thronged but decorous, the quiet engine-room of the
surrounding city's most far-reaching occupation, and at the hall's
farther end you descry the "Future Room," and hear the unearthly
ramping and bellowing of the bulls and bears. Up and down the
street, on either hand, are the ship-brokers and insurers, and in
the upper stories foreign consuls among a multitude of lawyers and
notaries.

In 1856 this street was just assuming its present character. The cotton
merchants were making it their favorite place of commercial domicile.
The open thoroughfare served in lieu of the present exchanges; men made
fortunes standing on the curb-stone, and during bank hours the sidewalks
were perpetually crowded with cotton factors, buyers, brokers, weighers,
reweighers, classers, pickers, pressers, and samplers, and the air was
laden with cotton quotations and prognostications.

Number 3-1/2, second floor, front, was the office of Dr. Sevier. This
office was convenient to everything. Immediately under its windows lay
the sidewalks where congregated the men who, of all in New Orleans,
could best afford to pay for being sick, and least desired to die. Canal
street, the city's leading artery, was just below, at the near left-hand
corner. Beyond it lay the older town, not yet impoverished in those
days,--the French quarter. A single square and a half off at the right,
and in plain view from the front windows, shone the dazzling white walls
of the St. Charles Hotel, where the nabobs of the river plantations
came and dwelt with their fair-handed wives in seasons of peculiar
anticipation, when it is well to be near the highest medical skill. In
the opposite direction a three minutes' quick drive around the upper
corner and down Common street carried the Doctor to his ward in the
great Charity Hospital, and to the school of medic