Such was the choice presented by Honore Grandissime to Joseph Frowenfeld, as the former on a lively brown colt and the apothecary on a nervy chestnut fell into a gentle, preliminary trot while yet in the rue Royale, looked after by that great admirer of both, Raoul Innerarity.

“Douane?” said Frowenfeld. (It was the street we call Custom-house.)

“It has mud-holes,” objected Honore.

“Well, then, the rue du Canal?”

“The canal—­I can smell it from here.  Why not rue Bienville?”

Frowenfeld said he did not know. (We give the statement for what it is worth.)

Notice their route.  A spirit of perversity seems to have entered into the very topography of this quarter.  They turned up the rue Bienville (up is toward the river); reaching the levee, they took their course up the shore of the Mississippi (almost due south), and broke into a lively gallop on the Tchoupitoulas road, which in those days skirted that margin of the river nearest the sunsetting, namely, the eastern bank.

Conversation moved sluggishly for a time, halting upon trite topics or swinging easily from polite inquiry to mild affirmation, and back again.  They were men of thought, these two, and one of them did not fully understand why he was in his present position; hence some reticence.  It was one of those afternoons in early March that make one wonder how the rest of the world avoids emigrating to Louisiana in a body.

“Is not the season early?” asked Frowenfeld.

M. Grandissime believed it was; but then the Creole spring always seemed so, he said.

The land was an inverted firmament of flowers.  The birds were an innumerable, busy, joy-compelling multitude, darting and fluttering hither and thither, as one might imagine the babes do in heaven.  The orange-groves were in blossom; their dark-green boughs seemed snowed upon from a cloud of incense, and a listening ear might catch an incessant, whispered trickle of falling petals, dropping “as the honey-comb.”  The magnolia was beginning to add to its dark and shining evergreen foliage frequent sprays of pale new leaves and long, slender, buff buds of others yet to come.  The oaks, both the bare-armed and the “green-robed senators,” the willows, and the plaqueminiers, were putting out their subdued florescence as if they smiled in grave participation with the laughing gardens.  The homes that gave perfection to this beauty were those old, large, belvidered colonial villas, of which you may still here and there see one standing, battered into half ruin, high and broad, among foundries, cotton-and tobacco-sheds, junk-yards, and longshoremen’s hovels, like one unconquered elephant in a wreck of artillery.  In Frowenfeld’s day the “smell of their garments was like Lebanon.”  They were seen by glimpses through chance openings in lofty hedges of Cherokee-rose or bois-d’arc, under boughs of cedar or pride-of-China, above their groves