“Even over the center of the roadway back from the front street, which is just behind the levee, it is unusual to find less than four feet of water, while in many places a nine-foot oar can not be made to touch bottom. In some of what, in times of low water, are beautiful residence streets, the boat as it went gliding on the shining moonlight flood would pass so close under the spreading branches of the great live oaks, which interlock their boughs over the roadway, that her occupants would be compelled to bend down almost level with the gunwales to avoid being swept off the thwarts. The freaks of the currents wandering through the flooded streets seem wholly unaccountable. Sometimes they would run parallel with, and at others directly at right angles to the streets. Often progress would be blocked by long sections of wooden-plank sidewalks, gates, doors and cisterns that had formed barriers across the street, while at every turning the boatman would be compelled to dodge huge floating masses of drift in which out-houses, timbers, sections of roofs and other heavy wreckage inextricably commingling were slowly floating on the lazy current. “The air was soft and balmy as that of a midsummer night, and the mellow light of the young moon that was already hanging low over the great sand hills to the westward, spread a soft pale light of deep blue on the bright spangled sky. There were faint night breezes waving the topmost branches of the great shade trees, but they did not touch the rippleless, shining flood which gleamed in long narrow paths. The white moonbeams that, like ribbons of burnished silver, but slept inky and motionless under the black shadows of the trees, and the rounded outlines of each great shade tree was sharply reflected in the mirror-like surface of the water and bordered by a dainty rim of silver. Houses with snow-white walls were faithfully mirrored in that motionless, glittering flood. While to the eastward of each lay a long, deep shadow--a starless night--huge shapeless masses of wreckage drifting past black opaque shadows that grew longer and more intense as the young moon sank so low that her lower horizon was dipping behind a great hoary-crested sand hill in the west. The scene was exquisitely beautiful, but at the same time weird and uncanny. Not a human voice was heard, but near at hand between the lower whispering of the softly dipping oars came the ever varying chorus of the frogs mingling with the low musical murmuring of the mighty river and the deep sullen roar of the crevasse on the far off southern shore. There the sides of the skiff would brush the perfumed shrubbery of a submerged lawn; there could be seen the tree-tops of a splendid orchard just rising out of the flood, their lower limbs swaying and bending with the current. In all this scene of beautiful ruins there was a sense of utter loneliness that was strangely oppressive. Of those who a week ago filled this bright and