No town in America, perhaps, could have contrasted more sharply with New York than New Orleans.  Angela felt this, even as the ship moved slowly along the great canal and slipped into the dark, turbid gold of the Mississippi River.  The drowsy landscape on either side was Southern landscape, and among live-oaks draped with mourning flags of moss, and magnolia-trees gemmed with buds, there were planters’ houses which seemed all roof and balcony.  Buzzards flew up suddenly, out of rice-fields, as the ship rounded a curve—­creatures big and long-legged as the storks of Holland and Algeria.  The wharf, when the ship docked at last, was filled with bales of cotton, and it was as if all the negroes in America must have come down to meet the boat.  She might have been walking into an old story of Cable’s, in the days “befoh the wah.”

Her idea had been to travel on to the West next day, but New Orleans held her.  She had left the Old World eagerly for the New; but this bit of the Old, in the midst of the New, made her feel as if she had stumbled into an ancient Spanish court, in the middle of a modern skyscraper.  The contrast was sharp as the impress of an old seal in new wax, and Angela loved it.  She liked her hotel, too, and said but half-heartedly each morning, “To-morrow I’ll go on.”  With Kate for duenna, she wandered through streets which, though they had historic French names, reminded her more of Spain than of France, with their rows of balconies and glimpses of flowery patios paved with mossy stones, or cracked but still beautiful tiles.  She made friends with an elderly French shopkeeper of the Vieux Carre, who looked as if carved out of ivory and yellowed with age.  His business was the selling of curiosities; antique furniture brought in sailing ships from France when New Orleans was in the making; quaintly set jewels worn by famous beauties of the great old days; brocades and velvets which had been their ball dresses; books which had Andrew Jackson’s name on yellow fly-leaves; weird souvenirs from the haunted house where terrible Madame Lalaurie tortured slaves to death; fetishes which had belonged to Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen; sticks and stones of the varnished house where Louis Philippe lived, and letters written by Nicholas Girod, who plotted to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and spirit him across the sea to New Orleans.  The selling of these things, or rather the collecting of them, was the pleasure as well as the business of Monsieur Bienvenu, and he had stored in his mind as many legends of the old town as he had stored treasures in his low-browed, musky-smelling shop.  Angela spent her mornings listening to his tales of slave-days, and always she bought something before she bade him au revoir, in the Parisian French which enchanted the old man.

“You light up my place, madame,” he said; and insisted, with graceful gestures, that she should not pay for her collection of old miniatures, necklaces, gilded crystal bottles, illuminated books and ivory crucifixes, until the day fixed for her departure.