The house has three stories and an attic.  The windows farthest from the street are masked by long, green latticed balconies or “galleries,” one to each story, which communicate with one another by staircases behind the lattices and partly overhang a small, damp, paved court which is quite hidden from outer view save from one or two neighboring windows.  On your right as you look down into this court a long, narrow wing stands out at right angles from the main house, four stories high, with the latticed galleries continuing along the entire length of each floor.  It bounds this court on the southern side.  Each story is a row of small square rooms, and each room has a single high window in the southern wall and a single door on the hither side opening upon the latticed gallery of that floor.  Wings of that sort were once very common in New Orleans in the residences of the rich; they were the house’s slave quarters.  But certainly some of the features you see here never were common—­locks seven inches across; several windows without sashes, but with sturdy iron gratings and solid iron shutters.  On the fourth floor the doorway communicating with the main house is entirely closed twice over, by two pairs of full length batten shutters held in on the side of the main house by iron hooks eighteen inches long, two to each shutter.  And yet it was through this doorway that the ghosts—­figuratively speaking, of course, for we are dealing with plain fact and history—­got into this house.

Will you go to the belvedere?  I went there once.  Unless the cramped stair that reaches it has been repaired you will find it something rickety.  The newspapers, writing fifty-five years ago in the heat and haste of the moment, must have erred as to heavy pieces of furniture being carried up this last cramped flight of steps to be cast out of the windows into the street far below.  Besides, the third-story windows are high enough for the most thorough smashing of anything dropped from them for that purpose.

The attic is cut up into little closets.  Lying in one of them close up under the roof maybe you will still find, as I did, all the big iron keys of those big iron locks down-stairs.  The day I stepped up into this belvedere it was shaking visibly in a squall of wind.  An electric storm was coming out of the north and west.  Yet overhead the sun still shone vehemently through the rolling white clouds.  It was grand to watch these.  They were sailing majestically hither and thither southward across the blue, leaning now this way and now that like a fleet of great ships of the line manoeuvring for position against the dark northern enemy’s already flashing and thundering onset.  I was much above any neighboring roof.  Far to the south and south-west the newer New Orleans spread away over the flat land.  North-eastward, but near at hand, were the masts of ships and steamers, with glimpses here and there of the water, and farther away the open breadth of the great yellow river sweeping