draining-canal that gave it its name tapered away between occasional overhanging willows and beside broken ranks of rotting palisades, its foul, crawling waters blushing, gilding and purpling under the swiftly waning light, and ending suddenly in the black shadow of the swamp.  The observer of this dismal prospect leaned heavily on his arm, and cast his glance out along the beautified corruption of the canal.  His eye seemed quickened to detect the smallest repellant details of the scene; every cypress stump that stood in, or overhung, the slimy water; every ruined indigo-vat or blasted tree, every broken thing, every bleached bone of ox or horse—­and they were many—­for roods around.  As his eye passed them slowly over and swept back again around the dreary view, he sighed heavily and said:  “Dissolution,” and then again—­“Dissolution! order of the day—­”

A secret overhearer might have followed, by these occasional exclamatory utterances, the course of a devouring trouble prowling up and down through his thoughts, as one’s eye tracks the shark by the occasional cutting of his fin above the water.

He spoke again: 

“It is in such moods as this that fools drown themselves.”

His speech was French.  He straightened up, smote the tree softly with his palm, and breathed a long, deep sigh—­such a sigh, if the very truth be told, as belongs by right to a lover.  And yet his mind did not dwell on love.

He turned and left the place; but the trouble that was plowing hither and thither through the deep of his meditations went with him.  As he turned into the rue Chartres it showed itself thus: 

“Right; it is but right;” he shook his head slowly—­“it is but right.”

In the rue Douane he spoke again: 

“Ah!  Frowenfeld”—­and smiled unpleasantly, with his head down.

And as he made yet another turn, and took his meditative way down the city’s front, along the blacksmith’s shops in the street afterward called Old Levee, he resumed, in English, and with a distinctness that made a staggering sailor halt and look after him: 

“There are but two steps to civilization, the first easy, the second difficult; to construct—­to reconstruct—­ah! there it is! the tearing down!  The tear’—­”

He was still, but repeated the thought by a gesture of distress turned into a slow stroke of the forehead.

“Monsieur Honore Grandissime,” said a voice just ahead.

“Eh, bien?”

At the mouth of an alley, in the dim light of the streep lamp, stood the dark figure of Honore Grandissime, f.m.c., holding up the loosely hanging form of a small man, the whole front of whose clothing was saturated with blood.

“Why, Charlie Keene!  Let him down again, quickly—­quickly; do not hold him so!”

“Hands off,” came in a ghastly whisper from the shape.

“Oh, Chahlie, my boy—­”

“Go and finish your courtship,” whispered the doctor.