, a lighthouse,
and a little fort. There the people who drove out in carriages were in the
habit of alighting and taking the cool air of the lake, and sipping
lemonades, wines, and ices before they turned homeward again along the
crowded way that they had come. In after years the place fell into utter
neglect. The customs station was removed, the fort was dismantled, the gay
carriage people drove on the "New Shell Road" and its tributaries,
Bienville and Canal streets, Washington and Carrollton avenues, and sipped
and smoked in the twilights and starlights of Carrollton Gardens and the
"New Lake End." The older haunt, once so bright with fashionable
pleasure-making, was left to the sole illumination of "St. John Light" and
the mongrel life of a bunch of cabins branded Crabtown, and became, in
popular superstition at least, the yearly rendezvous of the voodoos. Then
all at once in latter days it bloomed out in electrical, horticultural,
festal, pyrotechnical splendor as "Spanish Fort," and the carriages all
came rolling back.

So, whenever you and----visit Spanish Fort and stroll along the bayou's
edge on the fort side, and watch the broad schooners glide out through the
bayou's mouth and into the open water, you may say: "Somewhere just along
this bank, within the few paces between here and yonder, must be where
that schooner lay, moored and ready to sail for Mandeville the afternoon
that Madame Lalaurie, fleeing from the mob," etc.

For on that afternoon, when the people surrounded the house, crying for
vengeance, she never lost, it seems, her cunning. She and her sleek black
coachman took counsel together, and his plan of escape was adopted. The
early afternoon dinner-hour of those times came and passed and the crowd
still filled the street, but as yet had done nothing. Presently, right in
the midst of the throng, her carriage came to the door according to its
well-known daily habit at that hour, and at the same moment the charming
Madame Lalaurie, in all her pretty manners and sweetness of mien, stepped
quickly across the sidewalk and entered the vehicle.

The crowd was taken all aback. When it gathered its wits the coach-door
had shut and the horses were starting. Then her audacity was understood.

"She is getting away!" was the cry, and the multitude rushed upon her.
"Seize the horses!" they shouted, and dashed at the bits and reins. The
black driver gave the word to his beasts, and with his coach whip lashed
th