“How do you know?” asked the official.

“Dass what I goin’ to tell you.  You know, one evening I was shooting some grosbec.  I killed three, but I had trouble to fine them, it was becoming so dark.  When I have them I start’ to come home; then I got to pas’ at Jean Poquelin’s house.”

“Ho, ho, ho!” laughed the other, throwing his leg over the arm of his chair.

“Wait,” said the interpreter.  “I come along slow, not making some noises; still, still”—­

“And scared,” said the smiling one.

“Mais, wait.  I get all pas’ the ’ouse.  ‘Ah!’ I say; ‘all right!’ Then I see two thing’ before!  Hah!  I get as cold and humide, and shake like a leaf.  You think it was nothing?  There I see, so plain as can be (though it was making nearly dark), I see Jean—­Marie—­Po-que-lin walkin’ right in front, and right there beside of him was something like a man—­but not a man—­white like paint!—­I dropp’ on the grass from scared—­they pass’; so sure as I live ‘twas the ghos’ of Jacques Poquelin, his brother!”

“Pooh!” said the listener.

“I’ll put my han’ in the fire,” said the interpreter.

“But did you never think,” asked the other, “that that might be Jack Poquelin, as you call him, alive and well, and for some cause hid away by his brother?”

“But there har’ no cause!” said the other, and the entrance of third parties changed the subject.

Some months passed and the street was opened.  A canal was first dug through the marsh, the small one which passed so close to Jean Poquelin’s house was filled, and the street, or rather a sunny road, just touched a corner of the old mansion’s dooryard.  The morass ran dry.  Its venomous denizens slipped away through the bulrushes; the cattle roaming freely upon its hardened surface trampled the superabundant undergrowth.  The bellowing frogs croaked to westward.  Lilies and the flower-de-luce sprang up in the place of reeds; smilax and poison-oak gave way to the purple-plumed iron-weed and pink spiderwort; the bindweeds ran everywhere blooming as they ran, and on one of the dead cypresses a giant creeper hung its green burden of foliage and lifted its scarlet trumpets.  Sparrows and red-birds flitted through the bushes, and dewberries grew ripe beneath.  Over all these came a sweet, dry smell of salubrity which the place had not known since the sediments of the Mississippi first lifted it from the sea.

But its owner did not build.  Over the willow-brakes, and down the vista of the open street, bright new houses, some singly, some by ranks, were prying in upon the old man’s privacy.  They even settled down toward his southern side.  First a wood-cutter’s hut or two, then a market gardener’s shanty, then a painted cottage, and all at once the faubourg had flanked and half surrounded him and his dried-up marsh.