in which physicians prescribe aqua.  Resolved, in other words, without ceasing to be Frowenfeld the studious, to begin at once the perusal of this newly found book, the Community of New Orleans.  True, he knew he should find it a difficult task—­not only that much of it was in a strange tongue, but that it was a volume whose displaced leaves would have to be lifted tenderly, blown free of much dust, re-arranged, some torn fragments laid together again with much painstaking, and even the purport of some pages guessed out.  Obviously, the place to commence at was that brightly illuminated title-page, the ladies Nancanou.

As the sun rose and diffused its beams in an atmosphere whose temperature had just been recorded as 50 deg.  F., the apothecary stepped half out of his shop-door to face the bracing air that came blowing upon his tired forehead from the north.  As he did so, he said to himself: 

“How are these two Honore Grandissimes related to each other, and why should one be thought capable of attempting the life of Agricola?”

The answer was on its way to him.

There is left to our eyes but a poor vestige of the picturesque view presented to those who looked down the rue Royale before the garish day that changed the rue Enghien into Ingine street, and dropped the ‘e’ from Royale.  It was a long, narrowing perspective of arcades, lattices, balconies, zaguans, dormer windows, and blue sky—­of low, tiled roofs, red and wrinkled, huddled down into their own shadows; of canvas awnings with fluttering borders, and of grimy lamp-posts twenty feet in height, each reaching out a gaunt iron arm over the narrow street and dangling a lamp from its end.  The human life which dotted the view displayed a variety of tints and costumes such as a painter would be glad to take just as he found them:  the gayly feathered Indian, the slashed and tinselled Mexican, the leather-breeched raftsmen, the blue-or yellow-turbaned negresse, the sugar-planter in white flannel and moccasins, the average townsman in the last suit of clothes of the lately deceased century, and now and then a fashionable man in that costume whose union of tight-buttoned martial severity, swathed throat, and effeminate superabundance of fine linen seemed to offer a sort of state’s evidence against the pompous tyrannies and frivolities of the times.

The marchande des calas was out.  She came toward Joseph’s shop, singing in a high-pitched nasal tone this new song: 

     “De’tit zozos—­ye te assis—­
     De’tit zozos—­si la barrier. 
     De’tit zozos, qui zabotte;
     Qui ca ye di’ mo pas conne.

     “Manzeur-poulet vini simin,
     Croupe si ye et croque ye;
     Personn’ pli’ ‘tend’ ye zabotte—­
     De’tit zozos si la barrier.”

“You lak dat song?” she asked, with a chuckle, as she let down from her turbaned head a flat Indian basket of warm rice cakes.