Four men, leaning or standing at a small bar, were talking excitedly in the Creole patois.  They made frequent anxious, yet amusedly defiant, mention of a certain Pointe Canadienne.  It was a portion of the Mississippi River “coast” not far above New Orleans, where the merchants of the city met the smugglers who came up from the Gulf by way of Barrataria Bay and Bayou.  These four men did not call it by the proper title just given; there were commercial gentlemen in the Creole city, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Yankees, as well as French and Spanish Creoles, who in public indignantly denied, and in private tittered over, their complicity with the pirates of Grand Isle, and who knew their trading rendezvous by the sly nickname of “Little Manchac.”  As Frowenfeld passed these four men they, too, ceased speaking and looked after him, three with offensive smiles and one with a stare of contempt.

Farther on, some Creoles were talking rapidly to an Americain, in English.

“And why?” one was demanding.  “Because money is scarce.  Under other governments we had any quantity!”

“Yes,” said the venturesome Americain in retort, “such as it was; assignats, liberanzas, bons—­Claiborne will give us better money than that when he starts his bank.”

“Hah! his bank, yes!  John Law once had a bank, too; ask my old father.  What do we want with a bank?  Down with banks!” The speaker ceased; he had not finished, but he saw the apothecary.  Frowenfeld heard a muttered curse, an inarticulate murmur, and then a loud burst of laughter.

A tall, slender young Creole whom he knew, and who had always been greatly pleased to exchange salutations, brushed against him without turning his eyes.

“You know,” he was saying to a companion, “everybody in Louisiana is to be a citizen, except the negroes and mules; that is the kind of liberty they give us—­all eat out of one trough.”

“What we want,” said a dark, ill-looking, but finely-dressed man, setting his claret down, “and what we have got to have, is”—­he was speaking in French, but gave the want in English—­“Representesh’n wizout Taxa—­” There his eye fell upon Frowenfeld and followed him with a scowl.

“Mah frang,” he said to his table companion, “wass you sink of a mane w’at hask-a one neegrow to ’ave-a one shair wiz ’im, eh?—­in ze sem room?”

The apothecary found that his fame was far wider and more general than he had supposed.  He turned to go out, bowing as he did so, to an Americain merchant with whom he had some acquaintance.

“Sir?” asked the merchant, with severe politeness, “wish to see me?  I thought you—­As I was saying, gentlemen, what, after all, does it sum up?”

A Creole interrupted him with an answer: 

“Leetegash’n, Spoleeash’n, Pahtitsh’n, Disintegrhash’n!”

The voice was like Honore’s.  Frowenfeld looked; it was Agamemnon Grandissime.

“I must go to Maspero’s,” thought the apothecary, and he started up the rue Chartres.  As he turned into the rue St. Louis, he suddenly found himself one of a crowd standing before a newly-posted placard, and at a glance saw it to be one of the inflammatory publications which were a feature of the times, appearing both daily and nightly on walls and fences.