And this Ruling itself grew to be a Precedent, and the Actual Settler framed it, and taught his children to spell from it, and there was sound sleep o’ nights from the pines to the sage-brush, and from the chaparral to the great brown river of the north.

But I think, and I am sure the Commissioner never thought otherwise, that whether Kampfer was a snuffy old instrument of destiny, or whether the meanders of the Chiquito accidentally platted themselves into that memorable sweet profile or not, there was brought about “something good for a whole lot of children,” and the result ought to be called “Georgia’s Ruling.”

XXIII

BLIND MAN’S HOLIDAY

Alas for the man and for the artist with the shifting point of perspective!  Life shall be a confusion of ways to the one; the landscape shall rise up and confound the other.  Take the case of Lorison.  At one time he appeared to himself to be the feeblest of fools; at another he conceived that he followed ideals so fine that the world was not yet ready to accept them.  During one mood he cursed his folly; possessed by the other, he bore himself with a serene grandeur akin to greatness:  in neither did he attain the perspective.

Generations before, the name had been “Larsen.”  His race had bequeathed him its fine-strung, melancholy temperament, its saving balance of thrift and industry.

From his point of perspective he saw himself an outcast from society, forever to be a shady skulker along the ragged edge of respectability; a denizen des trois-quartz de monde, that pathetic spheroid lying between the haut and the demi, whose inhabitants envy each of their neighbours, and are scorned by both.  He was self-condemned to this opinion, as he was self-exiled, through it, to this quaint Southern city a thousand miles from his former home.  Here he had dwelt for longer than a year, knowing but few, keeping in a subjective world of shadows which was invaded at times by the perplexing bulks of jarring realities.  Then he fell in love with a girl whom he met in a cheap restaurant, and his story begins.

The Rue Chartres, in New Orleans, is a street of ghosts.  It lies in the quarter where the Frenchman, in his prime, set up his translated pride and glory; where, also, the arrogant don had swaggered, and dreamed of gold and grants and ladies’ gloves.  Every flagstone has its grooves worn by footsteps going royally to the wooing and the fighting.  Every house has a princely heartbreak; each doorway its untold tale of gallant promise and slow decay.

By night the Rue Chartres is now but a murky fissure, from which the groping wayfarer sees, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of Moorish iron balconies.  The old houses of monsieur stand yet, indomitable against the century, but their essence is gone.  The street is one of ghosts to whosoever can see them.