were no sooner placed ere the procession came out of the church.  Flaming soldiers of the Governor’s guard, two by two; sober, sandalled friars in brown, priests in their robes,—­another batch of color; crosses shimmering, tapers emerging from the cool darkness within to pale by the light of day.  Then down on their knees to Him who sits high above the yellow haze fell the thousands in the Place d’Armes.  For here was the Host itself, flower-decked in white and crimson, its gold-tasselled canopy upheld by four tonsured priests, a sheen of purple under it,—­the Bishop of Louisiana in his robes.

“The Governor!” whispered Monsieur Vigo, and the word was passed from mouth to mouth as the people rose from their knees.  Francois Louis Hector, Baron de Carondelet, resplendent in his uniform of colonel in the royal army of Spain, his orders glittering on his breast,—­pillar of royalty and enemy to the Rights of Man!  His eye was stern, his carriage erect, but I seemed to read in his careworn face the trials of three years in this moist capital.  After the Governor, one by one, the waiting Associations fell in line, each with its own distinguishing sash.  So the procession moved off into the narrow streets of the city, the people in the Place dispersed to new vantage points, and Monsieur Vigo signed me to follow him.

“I have a frien’, la veuve Gravois, who lives ver’ quiet.  She have one room, and I ask her tek you in, Davy.”  He led the way through the empty Rue Chartres, turned to the right at the Rue Bienville, and stopped before an unpretentious house some three doors from the corner.  Madame Gravois, elderly, wizened, primp in a starched cotton gown, opened the door herself, fell upon Monsieur Vigo in the Creole fashion; and within a quarter of an hour I was installed in her best room, which gave out on a little court behind.  Monsieur Vigo promised to send his servant with my baggage, told me his address, bade me call on him for what I wanted, and took his leave.

First, there was Madame Gravois’ story to listen to as she bustled about giving orders to a kinky-haired negro girl concerning my dinner.  Then came the dinner, excellent—­if I could have eaten it.  The virtues of the former Monsieur Gravois were legion.  He had come to Louisiana from Toulon, planted indigo, fought a duel, and Madame was a widow.  So I condense two hours into two lines.  Happily, Madame was not proof against the habits of the climate, and she retired for her siesta.  I sought my room, almost suffocated by a heat which defies my pen to describe, a heat reeking with moisture sucked from the foul kennels of the city.  I had felt nothing like it in my former visit to New Orleans.  It seemed to bear down upon my brain, to clog the power of thought, to make me vacillating.  Hitherto my reasoning had led me to seek Monsieur de St. Gre, to count upon that gentleman’s common sense and his former friendship.  But now that the time had come for it, I shrank from such a meeting.  I remembered his passionate affection for Antoinette, I imagined that he would not listen calmly to one who was in some sort connected with her unhappiness.  So a kind of cowardice drove me first to Mrs. Temple.  She might know much that would save me useless trouble and blundering.