Synopses & Reviews
OLD CREOLE DAYS -- CONTENTS . ................................. ONE rgg OLD CREOLE DAYS. SIEUR GE0RGE.t IN the heart of New Orleans stands a large four- story brick building, that has so stood for about three-quarters of a century. Its rooms are rented to a class of persons occupying them simply for lack of activity to find better and cheaper quarters elsewhere. With its gray stucco peeling off in broad patches, it has a solemn look of gentility in rags, and stands, or, as it were, hangs, about the corner of two ancient streets, like a faded fop who pretends to be looking for employment. Under its main archway is a dingy apothecary- shop. On one street is the bazaar of a modiste elc robes et chapeaux and other humble shops on the other, the immense batten doors with gratings over the lintels, barred and bolted with masses of cob- webbed iron, like the door of a donjon, are over- hung by a creaking sign left by the sheriff, on which is faintly discernible the mention of wines I . Old Creole Days. and liquors. A peep through one of the shops re- veals a square court within, hung with many lines of wet clothes, its sides hugged by rotten staircases that seem vainly trying to clamber out of the rub- bish. The neighborhood is one long since given up to fifth-rate shops, whose masters and mistresses dis- play such enticing mottoes as Azc gagnd petit Innumerable children swarm about, and, by some charm of the place, are not run over, but obstruct the banquettes playing their clamorous games. The building is a thing of many windows, where passably good-looking women appear and disap pear, clad in cotton gowns, watering little outside shelves of flowers and cacti, or hanging canaries cages.Their husbands are keepers in wine-ware- houses, rent-collectors for the agents of old French- men who have been laid up to dry in Paris, cus- tom-house supernumeraries and court-clerks depu- ties for your second-rate Creole is a great seeker for little offices. A decaying cornice hangs over, dropping bits of mortar on passers below, like a boy at a boarding-house. The landlord is one Kookoo, an ancient Creole of doubtful purity of blood, who in his landlordly old age takes all suggestions of repairs as personal insults. He was but a stripling when his father left him this inheritance, and has grown old and wrinkled and brown, a sort of periodically animate Sietlr George., mummy, in the business. He smokes cascarilla, wears velveteen, and is as punctual as an executioner. To Kookoos venerable property a certain old man used for many years to come every evening, stumbling through the groups of prattling children who frolicked about in the early moonlight-whose name no one knew, but whom all the neighbors designated by the title of Sieur George. It was his wont to be seen taking a straight-too straight --course toward his home, never careening to right or left, but now forcing himself slowly forward, as though there were a high gale in front, and now scudding briskly ahead at a ridiculous little dogtrot, as if there were a tornado behind. He would go up the nain staircase very carefully, sometimes stopping half-way up for thirty or forty minutes doze, but getting to the landing eventually, and tramping into his room in the second story, with no little elation ti 5nd it still there. Were it not for these slight symptoms of potations, he was such a one as you would pick out of a thousandfor a miser. A year or two ago he suddenly disappeared. A great many years ago, when the old house was still new, a young man with no baggage save a sinall hair-trunk, came and took the room I have mentioned and another adjoining. He supposed he might stay fifty days-and he stayed fifty years Old Creole Days. and over...