Captain Bangham, with a mortal aversion to Lafitte, hovered about the outside of the glass door, and left the office several times, before the talk on business was concluded. In those beatific days Cotton was King, and His Majesty’s concerns required a great deal of mercantile, as well as political, attention. It was about eleven o’clock when, the talk on business concluded, Mr. Lafitte strolled up State street, with the intention of dropping in at Parker’s to lunch. If anything had been needed to complete his elation, the warm and beautiful blue day which shone upon the crowded city, would have done it. Like Sir Ralph the Rover, in Southey’s poem, his heart was joyful to excess; and equally true was it that like that Rover, this Rover’s mirth was wickedness. He felt, as he himself would have expressed it, refreshingly wicked. Lunch over, and a drink taken, Mr. Lafitte thought it would be pleasant diversion to visit that Nigger Hill he had heard so much about, and see how the colored brethren were lodged. Enchanted with the idea, he engaged a carriage, and lighting a cigar, got in, and told the driver where to carry him. The carriage set off, and Mr. Lafitte, lolling back on the cushions, smoked placidly, and indolently gazed out of the window at the passengers. Presently, instead of passengers to gaze at, there were the elegant aristocratic dwellings in the streets on Beacon Hill, and soon after there were the dingy houses of the negro quarter. His cigar smoked out, Mr. Lafitte enjoyed whatever there was to enjoy in the prospect the carriage window afforded. It was pretty near dinner-time in that region, and most of the people were indoors. A few colored men and women stood at some of the thresholds or looked out at the windows, and colored urchins were playing in the streets. The carriage driving slowly, Belknap street, South Russell street, Butolph street, Garden street, Centre street, May street, Grove street, and all the streets of the quarter, passed in successive review under the interested and inspecting eyes of the gallant Southerner. In Grove street, a fancy came upon him to walk a few steps and note the effect from the pavement. Stopping the carriage, he got out, and bidding the driver wait there for him, he walked on, and turned the corner into Southac street. Walking slowly, and contemplatively twirling his moustache, while he softly hummed an air, he gazed with a roving eye at the squalid and sunlit houses of mingled brick and wood which stood in the vertical light on either side of the street. There were few people about, fewer even than he had seen in the streets he had passed through, and beginning to find it a bore, he was turning to go back to the carriage, when his eye chanced to rest on the closed window of a house obliquely opposite to him, and stopping in the midst of his humming, his hand fell from his moustache, and he stood still.