e, place, circumstance, in every essential
feature, I give them as I got them--strange stories that truly happened,
all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana.

In the spring of 1883, being one night the guest of my friend Dr. Francis
Bacon, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the conversation turning, at the
close of the evening, upon wonderful and romantic true happenings, he
said:

"You are from New Orleans; did you never hear of Salome Mueller?"

"No."

Thereupon he told the story, and a few weeks later sent me by mail, to my
home in New Orleans, whither I had returned, a transcription, which he had
most generously made, of a brief summary of the case--it would be right to
say tragedy instead of case--as printed in "The Law Reporter" some forty
years ago. That transcription lies before me now, beginning, "The Supreme
Court of the State of Louisiana has lately been called upon to investigate
and decide one of the most interesting cases which has ever come under the
cognizance of a judicial tribunal." This episode, which had been the cause
of public excitement within the memory of men still living on the scene,
I, a native resident of New Orleans and student of its history, stumbled
upon for the first time nearly two thousand miles from home.

I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one after another.
None remembered ever having heard of it. I appealed to a former
chief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal remembrance of every
member of the bench and the bar concerned in the case; but of the case he
had no recollection. One of the medical experts called in by the court for
evidence upon which the whole merits of the case seemed to hang was still
living--the distinguished Creole physician, Dr. Armand Mercier. He could
not recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the
vaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took down
from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court
decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the old
newspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasure
speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions
to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in
those days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a
steamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded
in ten lines of colorless statement.