One pleasant afternoon, when the June sun was a little less fervid than usual, and a moist breeze blew across the lake, we drove up the levee, past elegant country places, embowered in shrubbery and half concealed from the road by luxuriant hedges of Cherokee rose, to the residence of Mr. Roselius, to keep an engagement for dinner. Our genial old host came running out to greet us, hurrying like a boy down the high steps, which, after the prevailing fashion in this moist climate, lead directly from the paved walk to the second-story veranda. A dozen or more gentlemen were in the parlor. Among them I remember two or three noted New Orleans lawyers, one or two sugar-planters who had been absent in Europe during the war, and a Spanish officer, fresh from some one of the perpetually recurring South American revolutions. One noticed here, as at most of the formal dinner parties given during our stay, and at my subsequent visits to the city, the absence of all ladies save those of the host’s household. Indeed, except in peculiar cases like this, the prevailing idea of a dinner in New Orleans seems to have for its leading feature copious libations of a great many kinds of the choicest wines—to be licensed by the earliest possible retiracy of the hostess. Among Mr. Roselius’s guests that evening was a modest-looking little gentleman, of retiring manners, and with apparently very little to say; though the keen eyes and well-shaped head sufficiently showed the silence to be no mask for poverty of intellect. It was Mr. Paul Morphy, the foremost chess-player of the world, now a lawyer, but, alas! by no means the foremost young lawyer of this his native city. “If he were only as good in his profession as he is at chess-playing!” said one of the legal gentlemen, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he spoke in an undertone of the abilities of the elder Morphy, and the hopes that had long been cherished of the son. They evidently looked upon the young chess-player as a prosperous banker does upon his only boy, who persists in neglecting his desk in the bank parlor and becoming a vagabond artist. The gentlemen just returned from Europe expressed their astonishment at the fortunes that had been accumulated by shrewd adventurers during their absence. Men whom they had left the masters of Carondelet Street, they found in a state of genteel beggary. New names had arisen, unknown to their four-year old memories of the city. “By the way, Mr. Durant,” said one, “how does it happen that you haven’t profited more by your chances—become Governor, or Senator, say, if you didn’t care for any more money?” “I should have blushed if Cato’s house had stood secure And flourished in a civil war,” was the ready and only response.