ed sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant
merchandise. The crowd--and if it is near the time of the carnival it
will be great--will follow Canal street.

But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover of
Creole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone to
call the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a few auction
rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize that you
have left behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchants
before you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, where
an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories,
overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon
everything has settled down a long Sabbath of decay. The vehicles in the
street are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are
shrunken into shops; you see here and there, like a patch of bright
mould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many great
doors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many street
windows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten,
and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the older
Franco-Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor almost oriental.

Yet beauty lingers here. To say nothing of the picturesque, sometimes
you get sight of comfort, sometimes of opulence, through the unlatched
wicket in some _porte-cochere_--red-painted brick pavement, foliage of
dark palm or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and blooming
parterres; or through a chink between some pair of heavy batten
window-shutters, opened with an almost reptile wariness, your eye gets a
glimpse of lace and brocade upholstery, silver and bronze, and much
similar rich antiquity.

The faces of the inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the street
a sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting
you off your guard, there will pass you a woman--more likely two or
three--of patrician beauty.

Now, if you will go far enough down this old street, you will see, as
you approach its intersection with----. Names in that region elude one
like ghosts.

However, as you begin to find the way a trifle more open, you will not
fail to notice on the right-hand side, about midway of the square, a
small, low, brick house of a story and a half, set out upon the
sidewalk, as weather-beaten and mute as an aged beggar fallen asleep.
Its