guish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the
antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a
vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some
of his oranges, a dozen at six cents.

From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the
representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where
plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the
ancient regime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory
from the carven stone.

Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the
levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living
iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground,
with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon
teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the
more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the
anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner
in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of
the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The
lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale
was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it
into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws
closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened,
flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five
inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to
disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw
remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I
thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible
yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque,
through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed."

The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to
Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit
to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of
futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their
country that had sold them for expediency.

With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of
those who had once been opulent--the princely misery that never doffed
its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to w