st! do yez hear!" shouted Finnegan; and the conflict had ceased ere
the yellow river could reflect the sun from the polished bayonets.

You remember, of course, how long the strike lasted, and how many
battles were fought and lives lost before the final adjustment of
affairs. It was a fearsome war, and many forgot afterwards whose was
the first life lost in the struggle,--poor little Mr. Baptiste's, whose
body lay at the Morgue unclaimed for days before it was finally dropped
unnamed into Potter's Field.

A CARNIVAL JANGLE

There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of
jester's noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colours. The
streets swarm with humanity,--humanity in all shapes, manners, forms,
laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and
children, as varied and assorted in their several individual
peculiarities as ever a crowd that gathered in one locality since the
days of Babel.

It is Carnival in New Orleans; a brilliant Tuesday in February, when
the very air gives forth an ozone intensely exhilarating, making one
long to cut capers. The buildings are a blazing mass of royal purple
and golden yellow, national flags, bunting, and decorations that laugh
in the glint of the Midas sun. The streets are a crush of jesters and
maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and
monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants
and comic ones, of befeathered and belled horses; a dream of colour and
melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that
shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before the bewildered
eye.

A bevy of bright-eyed girls and boys of that uncertain age that hovers
between childhood and maturity, were moving down Canal Street when
there was a sudden jostle with another crowd meeting them. For a
minute there was a deafening clamour of shouts and laughter, cracking
of the whips, which all maskers carry, a jingle and clatter of carnival
bells, and the masked and unmasked extricated themselves and moved from
each other's paths. But in the confusion a tall Prince of Darkness had
whispered to one of the girls in the unmasked crowd: "You'd better come
with us, Flo; you're wasting time in that tame gang. Slip off, they'll
never miss you; we'll get you a rig, and show you what life is."

And so it happened, when a half-hour passed, and the bright-eyed bevy
missed Flo and couldn