as I never saw! “—­the marvel of the ball-room—­could handle a partner of twice his weight; the speaker had seen him take a lady so tall that his head hardly came up to her bosom, whirl her in the waltz from right to left—­this way! and then, as quick as lightning, turn and whirl her this way, from left to right—­“so grezful ligue a peajohn!  He could read and write, and knew more comig song!”—­the speaker would hasten to secure him before he should take some other situation.

The wonderful waltzer never appeared upon the scene; yet Joseph made shift to get along, and by and by found a man who partially met his requirements.  The way of it was this:  With his forefinger in a book which he had been reading, he was one day pacing his shop floor in deep thought.  There were two loose threads hanging from the web of incident weaving around him which ought to connect somewhere; but where?  They were the two visits made to his shop by the young merchant, Honore Grandissime.  He stopped still to think; what “train of thought” could he have started in the mind of such a man?

He was about to resume his walk, when there came in, or more strictly speaking, there shot in, a young, auburn-curled, blue-eyed man, whose adolescent buoyancy, as much as his delicate, silver-buckled feet and clothes of perfect fit, pronounced him all-pure Creole.  His name, when it was presently heard, accounted for the blond type by revealing a Franco-Celtic origin.

“’Sieur Frowenfel’,” he said, advancing like a boy coming in after recess, “I ‘ave somet’ing beauteeful to place into yo’ window.”

He wheeled half around as he spoke and seized from a naked black boy, who at that instant entered, a rectangular object enveloped in paper.

Frowenfeld’s window was fast growing to be a place of art exposition.  A pair of statuettes, a golden tobacco-box, a costly jewel-casket, or a pair of richly gemmed horse-pistols—­the property of some ancient gentleman or dame of emaciated fortune, and which must be sold to keep up the bravery of good clothes and pomade that hid slow starvation—­went into the shop-window of the ever-obliging apothecary, to be disposed of by tombola.  And it is worthy of note in passing, concerning the moral education of one who proposed to make no conscious compromise with any sort of evil, that in this drivelling species of gambling he saw nothing hurtful or improper.  But “in Frowenfeld’s window” appeared also articles for simple sale or mere transient exhibition; as, for instance, the wonderful tapestries of a blind widow of ninety; tremulous little bunches of flowers, proudly stated to have been made entirely of the bones of the ordinary catfish; others, large and spreading, the sight of which would make any botanist fall down “and die as mad as the wild waves be,” whose ticketed merit was that they were composed exclusively of materials produced upon Creole soil; a picture of the Ursulines’ convent and chapel, done in forty-five