So passed the time as the vessel, hour by hour, now slowly pushed by the wind against the turbid current, now warping along the fragrant precincts of orange or magnolia groves or fields of sugar-cane, or moored by night in the deep shade of mighty willow-jungles, patiently crept toward the end of their pilgrimage; and in the length of time which would at present be consumed in making the whole journey from their Northern home to their Southern goal, accomplished the distance of ninety-eight miles, and found themselves before the little, hybrid city of “Nouvelle Orleans.”  There was the cathedral, and standing beside it, like Sancho beside Don Quixote, the squat hall of the Cabildo with the calabozo in the rear.  There were the forts, the military bakery, the hospitals, the plaza, the Almonaster stores, and the busy rue Toulouse; and, for the rest of the town, a pleasant confusion of green tree-tops, red and gray roofs, and glimpses of white or yellow wall, spreading back a few hundred yards behind the cathedral, and tapering into a single rank of gardened and belvedered villas, that studded either horn of the river’s crescent with a style of home than which there is probably nothing in the world more maternally homelike.

“And now,” said the “captain,” bidding the immigrants good-by, “keep out of the sun and stay in after dark; you’re not ‘acclimated,’ as they call it, you know, and the city is full of the fever.”

Such were the Frowenfelds.  Out of such a mold and into such a place came the young Americain, whom even Agricola Fusilier, as we shall see, by and by thought worthy to be made an exception of, and honored with his recognition.

The family rented a two-story brick house in the rue Bienville, No. 17, it seems.  The third day after, at daybreak, Joseph called his father to his bedside to say that he had had a chill, and was suffering such pains in his head and back that he would like to lie quiet until they passed off.  The gentle father replied that it was undoubtedly best to do so, and preserved an outward calm.  He looked at his son’s eyes; their pupils were contracted to tiny beads.  He felt his pulse and his brow; there was no room for doubt; it was the dreaded scourge—­the fever.  We say, sometimes, of hearts that they sink like lead; it does not express the agony.

On the second day, while the unsated fever was running through every vein and artery, like soldiery through the streets of a burning city, and far down in the caverns of the body the poison was ransacking every palpitating corner, the poor immigrant fell into a moment’s sleep.  But what of that?  The enemy that moment had mounted to the brain.  And then there happened to Joseph an experience rare to the sufferer by this disease, but not entirely unknown,—­a delirium of mingled pleasures and distresses.  He seemed to awake somewhere between heaven and earth, reclining in a gorgeous barge, which was draped in curtains of interwoven