“Gentlemen,” he said (Professor Matthews tells it in French), “I shall divide my speech into three shirts.”  He then announced:  “First shirt”—­and made his first point.  This accomplished, he paused briefly, then proclaimed:  “Second shirt,” and followed with his second point.  Then:  “Third and last shirt,” and after completing his argument sat down.  The delighted jury gave him the verdict, but his witticism involved him in a duel with the worsted advocate.  The result of this duel Professor Matthews does not tell, but if the wag’s colichemarde was as swift and penetrating as his wit, we may surmise that his opponent of the Code Napoleon and the code duello had a fourth shirt spoiled.

CHAPTER LVIII

FROM ANTIQUES TO PIRATES

The numerous antique shops of the French quarter, with their gray, undulating floors and their piled-up, dusty litter of old furniture, plate, glass, and china, and the equally numerous old book stores, with their piles of French publications, their shadowy corners, their pleasant ancient bindings and their stale smell, are peculiarly reminiscent of similar establishments in Paris.

That Eugene Field knew these shops well we have reason to know by at least two of his poems.  In one, “The Discreet Collector,” he tells us that: 

    Down south there is a curio shop
    Unknown to many men;
    Thereat do I intend to stop
    When I am South again;
    The narrow street through which to go—­
    Aha!  I know it well! 
    And maybe you would like to know—­
    But no—­I will not tell!

But later, when filled with remorse over his extravagance in “blowing twenty dollars in by nine o’clock A.M.,” he reveals the location of his favorite establishment, saying: 

    In Royal Street (near Conti) there’s a lovely curio shop,
    And there, one balmy fateful morn, it was my chance to stop—­

So that, at least, is the neighborhood in which he learned that: 

    The curio collector is so blindly lost in sin
    That he doesn’t spend his money—­he simply blows it in!

In his verses called “Doctor Sam,” Field touched on another fascinating side of Creole negro life:  the mysterious beliefs and rites of voodooism—­or, as it is more often spelled, voudouism.

Until a few years ago it used to be possible for a visitor with a “pull” in New Orleans to see some of the voudou performances and to have “a work made” for him, but the police have dealt so severely with those who believe in this barbarous nonsense, that it is practised in these times only with the utmost secrecy.

Voudouism was brought by the early slaves from the Congo, but in Louisiana the negroes—­probably desiring to imitate the religion of their white masters—­appropriated some of the Roman Catholic saints and made them subject to the Great Serpent, or Grand Zombi, who is the voudou god.  These saints, however, are given voudou names, St. Michael, for example, being Blanc Dani, and St. Peter, Papa Liba.  This situation is the antithesis of that to be found in Brittany, where Druidical beliefs, handed down for generations among the peasants, may now be faintly traced running like on odd alien threads through the strong fabric of Roman Catholicism.