Who was she?--who was her Julien? ... When the Estelle and many other vessels had discharged their ghastly cargoes;--when the bereaved of the land had assembled as hastily as they might for the du y of identification;--when memories were strained almost to madness in research of names, dates, incidents--for the evocation of dead words, resurrection of vanished days, recollection of dear promises,--then, in the confusion, it was believed and declared that the little corpse found on the pelican island was the daughter of the wearer of the wedding ring: Adele La Brierre, nee Florane, wife of Dr. Julien La Brierre, of New Orleans, who was numbered among the missing.

And they brought dead Adele back,--up shadowy river windings, over linked brightnesses of lake and lakelet, through many a green glimmering bayou,--to the Creole city, and laid her to rest somewhere in the old Saint-Louis Cemetery. And upon the tablet recording her name were also graven the words--

Aussi a la memoire de son mari;

JULIEN RAYMOND LA BRIERRE, ne a la paroisse St. Landry, le 29 Mai; MDCCCXXVIII; et de leur fille, EULALIE, agee de 4 as et 5 mois,-- Qui tous perirent dans la grande tempete qui balaya L'Ile Derniere, le 10 Aout, MDCCCLVI ..... + ..... Priez pour eux!

Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen again upon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight of him, as at a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless the apparition cast a shadow. People paused, approached, half extended a hand through old habit, suddenly checked themselves and passed on,--wondering they should have forgotten, asking themselves why they had so nearly made an absurd mistake.

It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our snowless Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass;--and in that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year had passed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,--in that strange colonial columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behind squared marbles lettered in black or bronze. Yet her resting-place,--in the highest range,--already seemed old. Under our Southern sun, the vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into being spontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life! Microscopic mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in;--over its face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feet into the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soil below speckled euphorbias were growing up to her,--and morning glories,--and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not know the name.

And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson pouches in the sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting their color when approached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the caravans of the ants, journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;--the bees gathering honey from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of generations:--all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work--wondrous transformations of flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the vast light, a sturdy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as it quivered against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it: its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might not its roots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar nutriment within?--might it not be that something of the dead heart had risen to purple and emerald life--in the sap of translucent leaves, in the wine of the savage berries,--to blend with the blood of the Wizard Singer,--to lend a strange sweetness to the melody of his wooing? ...

... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, in the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances of life, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the human aggregate,---how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had learned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place therein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--had kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling his unanticipated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked for sympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight; and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment ill disguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He had come back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerning his estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--an unlucky guest, a revenant ... How hollow and selfish a world it seemed! And yet there was love in it; he had been loved in it, unselfishly, passionately, with the love of father and of mother, of wife and child ... All buried!--all lost forever! ... Oh! would to God the story of that stone were not a lie!--would to kind God he also were dead! ...