Among both blacks and whites the house was the object of a thousand superstitions.  Every midnight they affirmed, the feu follet came out of the marsh and ran in and out of the rooms, flashing from window to window.  The story of some lads, whose words in ordinary statements were worthless, was generally credited, that the night they camped in the woods, rather than pass the place after dark, they saw, about sunset, every window blood-red, and on each of the four chimneys an owl sitting, which turned his head three times round, and moaned and laughed with a human voice.  There was a bottomless well, everybody professed to know, beneath the sill of the big front door under the rotten veranda; whoever set his foot upon that threshold disappeared forever in the depth below.

What wonder the marsh grew as wild as Africa!  Take all the Faubourg Ste. Marie, and half the ancient city, you would not find one graceless dare-devil reckless enough to pass within a hundred yards of the house after nightfall.

* * * * *

The alien races pouring into old New Orleans began to find the few streets named for the Bourbon princes too strait for them.  The wheel of fortune, beginning to whirl, threw them off beyond the ancient corporation lines, and sowed civilization and even trade upon the lands of the Graviers and Girods.  Fields became roads, roads streets.  Everywhere the leveller was peering through his glass, rodsmen were whacking their way through willow-brakes and rose-hedges, and the sweating Irishmen tossed the blue clay up with their long-handled shovels.

“Ha! that is all very well,” quoth the Jean-Baptistes, fueling the reproach of an enterprise that asked neither co-operation nor advice of them, “but wait till they come yonder to Jean Poquelin’s marsh; ha! ha! ha!” The supposed predicament so delighted them, that they put on a mock terror and whirled about in an assumed stampede, then caught their clasped hands between their knees in excess of mirth, and laughed till the tears ran; for whether the street-makers mired in the marsh, or contrived to cut through old “Jean-ah’s” property, either event would be joyful.  Meantime a line of tiny rods, with bits of white paper in their split tops, gradually extended its way straight through the haunted ground, and across the canal diagonally.

“We shall fill that ditch,” said the men in mud-boots, and brushed close along the chained and padlocked gate of the haunted mansion.  Ah, Jean-ah Poquelin, those were not Creole boys, to be stampeded with a little hard swearing.