fifteen years ago was the suburban residence of the old sea-captain governor, Kerlerec.  It stands up among the oranges as silent and gray as a pelican, and, so far as we know, has never had one cypress plank added or subtracted since its master was called to France and thrown into the Bastile.  Another has two dormer windows looking out westward, and, when the setting sun strikes the panes, reminds one of a man with spectacles standing up in an audience, searching for a friend who is not there and will never come back.  These houses are the last remaining—­if, indeed, they were not pulled down yesterday—­of a group that once marked from afar the direction of the old highway between the city’s walls and the suburb St. Jean.  Here clustered the earlier aristocracy of the colony; all that pretty crew of counts, chevaliers, marquises, colonels, dons, etc., who loved their kings, and especially their kings’ moneys, with an abandon which affected the accuracy of nearly all their accounts.

Among these stood the great mother-mansion of the Grandissimes.  Do not look for it now; it is quite gone.  The round, white-plastered brick pillars which held the house fifteen feet up from the reeking ground and rose on loftily to sustain the great overspreading roof, or clustered in the cool, paved basement; the lofty halls, with their multitudinous glitter of gilded brass and twinkle of sweet-smelling wax-candles; the immense encircling veranda, where twenty Creole girls might walk abreast; the great front stairs, descending from the veranda to the garden, with a lofty palm on either side, on whose broad steps forty Grandissimes could gather on a birthday afternoon; and the belvidere, whence you could see the cathedral, the Ursulines’, the governor’s mansion, and the river, far away, shining between the villas of Tchoupitoulas Coast—­all have disappeared as entirely beyond recall as the flowers that bloomed in the gardens on the day of this fete de grandpere.

Odd to say, it was not the grandpere’s birthday that had passed.  For weeks the happy children of the many Grandissime branches—­the Mandarins, the St. Blancards, the Brahmins—­had been standing with their uplifted arms apart, awaiting the signal to clap hands and jump, and still, from week to week, the appointed day had been made to fall back, and fall back before—­what think you?—­an inability to understand Honore.

It was a sad paradox in the history of this majestic old house that her best child gave her the most annoyance; but it had long been so.  Even in Honore’s early youth, a scant two years after she had watched him, over the tops of her green myrtles and white and crimson oleanders, go away, a lad of fifteen, supposing he would of course come back a Grandissime of the Grandissimes—­an inflexible of the inflexibles—­he was found “inciting” (so the stately dames and officials who graced her front veranda called it) a Grandissime-De Grapion reconciliation by means of transatlantic letters,