The house was of heavy cypress, lifted up on pillars, grim, solid, and spiritless, its massive build a strong reminder of days still earlier, when every man had been his own peace officer and the insurrection of the blacks a daily contingency.  Its dark, weatherbeaten roof and sides were hoisted up above the jungly plain in a distracted way, like a gigantic ammunition-wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some retreating army.  Around it was a dense growth of low water willows, with half a hundred sorts of thorny or fetid bushes, savage strangers alike to the “language of flowers” and to the botanist’s Greek.  They were hung with countless strands of discolored and prickly smilax, and the impassable mud below bristled with chevaux de frise of the dwarf palmetto.  Two lone forest-trees, dead cypresses, stood in the centre of the marsh, dotted with roosting vultures.  The shallow strips of water were hid by myriads of aquatic plants, under whose coarse and spiritless flowers, could one have seen it, was a harbor of reptiles, great and small, to make one shudder to the end of his days.

The house was on a slightly raised spot, the levee of a draining canal.  The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of big, ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers.

Such was the home of old Jean Marie Poquelin, once an opulent indigo planter, standing high in the esteem of his small, proud circle of exclusively male acquaintances in the old city; now a hermit, alike shunned by and shunning all who had ever known him.  “The last of his line,” said the gossips.  His father lies under the floor of the St. Louis Cathedral, with the wife of his youth on one side, and the wife of his old age on the other.  Old Jean visits the spot daily.  His half-brother—­alas! there was a mystery; no one knew what had become of the gentle, young half brother, more than thirty years his junior, whom once he seemed so fondly to love, but who, seven years ago, had disappeared suddenly, once for all, and left no clew of his fate.

They had seemed to live so happily in each other’s love.  No father, mother, wife to either, no kindred upon earth.  The elder a bold, frank, impetuous, chivalric adventurer; the younger a gentle, studious, book-loving recluse; they lived upon the ancestral estate like mated birds, one always on the wing, the other always in the nest.

There was no trait in Jean Marie Poquelin, said the old gossips, for which he was so well known among his few friends as his apparent fondness for his “little brother.”  “Jacques said this,” and “Jacques said that;” he “would leave this or that, or any thing to Jacques,” for “Jacques was a scholar,” and “Jacques was good,” or “wise,” or “just,” or “far-sighted,” as the nature of the case required; and “he should ask Jacques as soon as he got home,” since Jacques was never elsewhere to be seen.

It was between the roving character of the one brother, and the bookishness of the other, that the estate fell into decay.  Jean Marie, generous gentleman, gambled the slaves away one by one, until none was left, man or woman, but one old African mute.