eight hundred dollars out of a plethoric purse, and also a finger-ring, diamond too, for two hundred and fifty dollars.  The jewelers are polite, as the bankers were.  He must be a large cotton-planter, one of a class with whom a fondness for jewels serves as a means of dozing away life in a kind of crystallization.  He otherwise adorns his stately person, till he has a Sublime Porte indeed, the very vizier of a fairy tale glittering in barbaric gems and gold.  His taste, to speak it mildly, is expressed rather than subdued—­not to be compared with the quiet elegance of your husband or lover, madam or miss, but not unsuited to his showy style, for all that.  As the crimson-purple, plume-like prince’s feather has its own royal charm in Southern gardens beside the pale and placidlily, so these luxuriant adornments, do not misbecome his full and not too fleshy person.  There is a certain harmony in the Oriental sumptuousness of his attire, like radiant sunsets, appropriate to certain styles of man and woman.  Let us humble creatures be content to have our portraits done in crayon, but the colonel calls for the color-box.

So adorned and radiant, this variety of the American aloe floats into the charmed circle of New Orleans society—­that lively, sparkling epitome and relic of the old regime.  He has good letters and a fair name, and mingles in the Mystick Krewe, that curious club, possible nowhere else, that has raised mummery into the sphere of aesthetics.  Perhaps he has worn the gray, perhaps the blue.  It is only in the very arcana of exclusive passion it makes much difference.  But gray or blue, or North or South in birth, he is in every essential a Southerner, as many, like S.S.  Prentiss, curiously independent of nativity, are.  He is well received and courteously entreated.  He has his little suppers at Moreau’s, and knows the ways of the place and names of the waiters.  He has his promenades, his drives, his club visits, is seen everywhere—­a brilliant convolvulus now, twining the espaliers of that Saracenic fabric of society; to speak architecturally, its very summer-house.  He visits the opera and gives it his frank approval, but confesses a preference for the old plantation-melodies.  He crushes through the meshes of the Creole dandies, not offensively, but as the law of his volume and momentum dictates, and they yield the pas to his superior weight and metal.  They are civil, and he is civil, but they do not like one another, for all that.  That Zodiac passed, they continue their own summery orbit of charm and conquest.  He tends toward the aureal spheres and the green and pleasant banks of issue.  The colonel is not here for pleasure, though he takes a little pleasure, as is his way, seasonably; but he means business, and that several thirsty, eager cotton-houses of repute know.

Of course they know.  It came in his letters and distills in the aroma of his talk.  It may even have slipped into the personals of the Pic and Times that Colonel Beverage has taken Millefleur and Rottenbottom plantations on Red River, and is going extensively into the cultivation of the staple.  The colonel is modest over this:  “not extensively, no, but to the extent of his limited means.”  In the mean while he looks out for some sound, well-recommended cotton-house.