The President expressed himself “surprised.”

“I don’t care a rush,” answered little White, wildly and foolishly.  “I don’t care a rush if you are, sir.  No, my nerves are not disordered; my head’s as clear as a bell.  No, I’m not excited.”  A Director remarked that the Secretary looked as though he had waked from a nightmare.

“Well, sir, if you want to know the fact, I have; and if you choose to cultivate old Poquelin’s society you can have one, too.”

“White,” called a facetious member, but White did not notice.  “White,” he called again.

“What?” demanded White, with a scowl.

“Did you see the ghost?”

“Yes, sir; I did,” cried White, hitting the table, and handing the President a paper which brought the Board to other business.

The story got among the gossips that somebody (they were afraid to say little White) had been to the Poquelin mansion by night and beheld something appalling.  The rumor was but a shadow of the truth, magnified and distorted as is the manner of shadows.  He had seen skeletons walking, and had barely escaped the clutches of one by making the sign of the cross.

Some madcap boys with an appetite for the horrible plucked up courage to venture through the dried marsh by the cattle-path, and come before the house at a spectral hour when the air was full of bats.  Something which they but half saw—­half a sight was enough—­sent them tearing back through the willow-brakes and acacia bushes to their homes, where they fairly dropped down, and cried: 

“Was it white?” “No—­yes—­nearly so—­we can’t tell—­but we saw it.”  And one could hardly doubt, to look at their ashen faces, that they had, whatever it was.

“If that old rascal lived in the country we come from,” said certain Americains, “he’d have been tarred and feathered before now, wouldn’t he, Sanders?”

“Well, now he just would.”

“And we’d have rid him on a rail, wouldn’t we?”

“That’s what I allow.”

“Tell you what you could do.”  They were talking to some rollicking Creoles who had assumed an absolute necessity for doing something.  “What is it you call this thing where an old man marries a young girl, and you come out with horns and”—­

“Charivari?” asked the Creoles.

“Yes, that’s it.  Why don’t you shivaree him?” Felicitous suggestion.

Little White, with his wife beside him, was sitting on their doorsteps on the sidewalk, as Creole custom had taught them, looking toward the sunset.  They had moved into the lately-opened street.  The view was not attractive on the score of beauty.  The houses were small and scattered, and across the flat commons, spite of the lofty tangle of weeds and bushes, and spite of the thickets of acacia, they needs must see the dismal old Poquelin mansion, tilted awry and shutting out the declining sun.  The moon, white and slender, was hanging the tip of its horn over one of the chimneys.