Produced by Suzanne Shell, L Barber and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
1907
A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you toand across Canal Street, the central avenue of the city, and to thatcorner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of thearcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrantmerchandise. The crowd—and if it is near the time of the carnival itwill be great—will follow Canal Street.
But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover ofCreole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone tocall the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a fewauction-rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize thatyou have left behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchantsbefore you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, wherean ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories,overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon everything has settled down a long sabbath of decay. The vehicles in thestreet are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores areshrunken into shops; you see here and there, like a patch of brightmould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many greatdoors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many streetwindows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten,and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the olderFranco-Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor almost oriental.
Yet beauty lingers here. To say nothing of the picturesque, sometimesyou get sight of comfort, sometimes of opulence, through the unlatchedwicket in some porte-cochère—red-painted brick pavement, foliage ofdark palm or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and bloomingparterres; or through a chink between some pair of heavy battenwindow-shutters, opened with an almost reptile wariness, your eye gets aglimpse of lace and brocade upholstery, silver and bronze, and muchsimilar rich antiquity.
The faces of the inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the streeta sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are puttingyou off your guard, there will pass you a woman—more likely two orthree—of patrician beauty.
Now, if you will go far enough down this old street, you will see, asyou approach its intersection with ——. Names in that region elude onelike ghosts.
However, as you begin to find the way a trifle more open, you will notfail to notice on the right-hand side, about midway of the square, asmall, low, brick house of a story and a half, set out upon thesidewalk, as weather-beaten and mute as an aged beggar fallen asleep.Its corrugated roof of dull red tiles, sloping down toward you with aninward curve, is overgrown with weeds, and in the fall of the year isgay with the yellow plumes of the golden-rod. You can almost touch withyour cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging eaves. The battenshutters at door and window, with hinges like those of a postern, areshut with