I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one after another.  None remembered ever having heard of it.  I appealed to a former chief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal remembrance of every member of the bench and the bar concerned in the case; but of the case he had no recollection.  One of the medical experts called in by the court for evidence upon which the whole merits of the case seemed to hang was still living—­the distinguished Creole physician, Dr. Armand Mercier.  He could not recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the vaguest way.  Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took down from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623.  I went to the old newspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasure speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in those days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a steamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded in ten lines of colorless statement.  I went to the courts, and, after following and abandoning several false trails through two days’ search, found that the books of record containing the object of my quest had been lost, having unaccountably disappeared in—­if I remember aright—­1870.

There was one chance left:  it was to find the original papers.  I employed an intelligent gentleman at so much a day to search till he should find them.  In the dusty garret of one of the court buildings—­the old Spanish Cabildo, that faces Jackson Square—­he rummaged for ten days, finding now one desired document and now another, until he had gathered all but one.  Several he drew out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of the floor, as if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found.  Yet I was content.  Through the perseverance of this gentleman and the intervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the courtesy of the court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story of the poor lost and found Salome Mueller.  How through the courtesy of some of the reportorial staff of the “New Orleans Picayune” I found and conversed with three of Salome’s still surviving relatives and friends, I shall not stop to tell.

While I was still in search of these things, the editor of the “New Orleans Times-Democrat” handed me a thick manuscript, asking me to examine and pronounce upon its merits.  It was written wholly in French, in a small, cramped, feminine hand.  I replied, when I could, that it seemed to me unfit for the purposes of transient newspaper publication, yet if he declined it I should probably buy it myself.  He replied that he had already examined it and decided to decline it, and it was only to know whether I, not he, could use it that I had been asked to read it.