The governor made a very quiet, unappreciative remark about a “patriotism that lets its government get choked up with corruption and then blows it out with gunpowder!”

The Creole shrugged.

“And repeats the operation indefinitely,” he said.

The governor said something often heard, before and since, to the effect that communities will not sacrifice themselves for mere ideas.

“My-de’-seh,” replied the Creole, “you speak like a true Anglo-Saxon; but, sir! how many communities have committed suicide.  And this one?—­why, it is just the kind to do it!”

“Well,” said the governor, smilingly, “you have pointed out what you consider to be the breakers, now can you point out the channel?”

“Channel?  There is none!  And you, nor I, cannot dig one.  Two great forces may ultimately do it, Religion and Education—­as I was telling you I said to my young friend, the apothecary,—­but still I am free to say what would be my first and principal step, if I was in your place—­as I thank God I am not.”

The listener asked him what that was.

“Wherever I could find a Creole that I could venture to trust, my-de’-seh, I would put him in office.  Never mind a little political heterodoxy, you know; almost any man can be trusted to shoot away from the uniform he has on.  And then—­”

“But,” said the other, “I have offered you—­”

“Oh!” replied the Creole, like a true merchant, “me, I am too busy; it is impossible!  But, I say, I would compel, my-de’-seh, this people to govern themselves!”

“And pray, how would you give a people a free government and then compel them to administer it?”

“My-de’-seh, you should not give one poor Creole the puzzle which belongs to your whole Congress; but you may depend on this, that the worst thing for all parties—­and I say it only because it is worst for all—­would be a feeble and dilatory punishment of bad faith.”

When this interview finally drew to a close the governor had made a memorandum of some fifteen or twenty Grandissimes, scattered through different cantons of Louisiana, who, their kinsman Honore thought, would not decline appointments.

* * * * *

Certain of the Muses were abroad that night.  Faintly audible to the apothecary of the rue Royale through that deserted stillness which is yet the marked peculiarity of New Orleans streets by night, came from a neighboring slave-yard the monotonous chant and machine-like tune-beat of an African dance.  There our lately met marchande (albeit she was but a guest, fortified against the street-watch with her master’s written “pass”) led the ancient Calinda dance with that well-known song of derision, in whose ever multiplying stanzas the helpless satire of a feeble race still continues to celebrate the personal failings of each newly prominent figure among the dominant caste.  There was a new distich to the song to-night, signifying that the pride of the Grandissimes must find his friends now among the Yankees: