egretted it, that I did not promptly reject his
proposition, that, in fact, I ever had anything to do with the
fellow."

It was almost invariably, so regularly do events run in this
world,--it was almost invariably that the negro messenger made his
appearance at this point. For five years the General had perhaps
not been interrupted as many times, either above or below the last
sentence. The mail, or rather the letter, was opened, and the usual
amount--three ten-dollar bills--was carefully extracted and counted.
And as if he scented the bills, even as the General said he did,
within ten minutes after their delivery, Journel made his appearance
to collect the rent.

It could only have been in Paris, among that old retired nobility, who
counted their names back, as they expressed it, "au de ca du deluge,"
that could have been acquired the proper manner of treating a
"roturier" landlord: to measure him with the eyes from head to foot;
to hand the rent--the ten-dollar bill--with the tips of the fingers;
to scorn a look at the humbly tendered receipt; to say: "The cistern
needs repairing, the roof leaks; I must warn you that unless such
notifications meet with more prompt attention than in the past,
you must look for another tenant," etc., in the monotonous tone of
supremacy, and in the French, not of Journel's dictionary, nor of
the dictionary of any such as he, but in the French of Racine and
Corneille; in the French of the above suggested circle, which inclosed
the General's memory, if it had not inclosed--as he never tired of
recounting--his star-like personality.

A sheet of paper always infolded the bank-notes. It always bore, in
fine but sexless tracery, "From one who owes you much."

There, that was it, that sentence, which, like a locomotive, bore the
General and his wife far on these firsts of the month to two opposite
points of the horizon, in fact, one from the other--"From one who owes
you much."

The old gentleman would toss the paper aside with the bill receipt.
In the man to whom the bright New Orleans itself almost owed its
brightness, it was a paltry act to search and pick for a debtor.
Friends had betrayed and deserted him; relatives had forgotten him;
merchants had failed with his money; bank presidents had stooped to
deceive him; for he was an old man, and had about run the gamut of
human disappointments--a gamut that had begun with a C major of trust,
hope, happiness, and money.

His political