You might mistake the time for mid-May.  Before the view lies the Place d’Armes in its green-breasted uniform of new spring grass crossed diagonally with white shell walks for facings, and dotted with the elite of the city for decorations.  Over the line of shade-trees which marks its farther boundary, the white-topped twin turrets of St. Louis Cathedral look across it and beyond the bared site of the removed battery (built by the busy Carondelet to protect Louisiana from herself and Kentucky, and razed by his immediate successors) and out upon the Mississippi, the color of whose surface is beginning to change with the changing sky of this beautiful and now departing day.  A breeze, which is almost early June, and which has been hovering over the bosom of the great river and above the turf-covered levee, ceases, as if it sank exhausted under its burden of spring odors, and in the profound calm the cathedral bell strikes the sunset hour.  From its neighboring garden, the convent of the Ursulines responds in a tone of devoutness, while from the parapet of the less pious little Fort St. Charles, the evening gun sends a solemn ejaculation rumbling down the “coast;” a drum rolls, the air rises again from the water like a flock of birds, and many in the square and on the levee’s crown turn and accept its gentle blowing.  Rising over the levee willows, and sinking into the streets,—­which are lower than the water,—­it flutters among the balconies and in and out of dim Spanish arcades, and finally drifts away toward that part of the sky where the sun is sinking behind the low, unbroken line of forest.  There is such seduction in the evening air, such sweetness of flowers on its every motion, such lack of cold, or heat, or dust, or wet, that the people have no heart to stay in-doors; nor is there any reason why they should.  The levee road is dotted with horsemen, and the willow avenue on the levee’s crown, the whole short mile between Terre aux Boeufs gate on the right and Tchoupitoulas gate on the left, is bright with promenaders, although the hour is brief and there will be no twilight; for, so far from being May, it is merely that same nineteenth of which we have already spoken,—­the nineteenth of Louisiana’s delicious February.

Among the throng were many whose names were going to be written large in history.  There was Casa Calvo,—­Sebastian de Casa Calvo de la Puerta y O’Farril, Marquis of Casa Calvo,—­a man then at the fine age of fifty-three, elegant, fascinating, perfect in Spanish courtesy and Spanish diplomacy, rolling by in a showy equipage surrounded by a clanking body-guard of the Catholic king’s cavalry.  There was young Daniel Clark, already beginning to amass those riches which an age of litigation has not to this day consumed; it was he whom the French colonial prefect, Laussat, in a late letter to France, had extolled as a man whose “talents for intrigue were carried to a rare degree of excellence.”  There was Laussat himself, in the flower of his years,