O ghoul of the empyrean, well doth thy brother, the Shadow-caster of deserts, know the time of the going and the coming of the caravans; and he maketh likewise each year the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet!--Thy cousins sit upon the Towers of Silence; and the charnel-pits of the dakhmas have no secrets for them! From the eternal silences of heaven,--from the heights that are echoless and never reached by human cry,--progenitors of thine have watched the faces of the continents wrinkle in the revolution of centuries; they have looked down upon the migrations of races; they have witnessed the growth and the extinction of nations; they have read the crimson history of a hundred thousand wars. Another shadow crosses my feet--and yet another passes; the orbits of their circlings intercross. Hanging above the dark fort, those black silhouettes cutting sharply athwart the azure seem grimly appropriate to this desolation. Doubtless the birds have haunted the coast for centuries. The Spaniard, who gave many a rich feast of eyes and hearts, has passed away;--the Vulture remains, and waits. For what?--is it for some vomit of the spuming sea,--some putrefaction of the buzzing shambles?--or does he, indeed, still hope, even after the passing of three hundred years, _for the return of Menendez?_ CREOLE PAPERS QUAINT NEW ORLEANS AND ITS HABITANTS I. FRENCH-TOWN Old New Orleans proper (French-Town, as it is termed by steamboatmen; Le Carré, as its own inhabitants call it) is principally, though not wholly, comprised in the great quadrilateral bounded by Canal, Esplanade, Rampart, and Old Levee streets. Where the horse-cars now run upon those thoroughfares formerly stood the bastioned walls of the colonial city, encircled by a deep moat. Double rows of trees now mark the old rampart lines upon three sides of the quadrilateral, and birds sing in their branches at just the height where brazen cannon once showed their black throats, where Swiss or Spanish sentries paced to and fro against the sky. Within the Carr? the streets are serried, solid, and picturesque. Memories of aristocratic wealth still endure in certain vast mansions, broad-balconied and deep-courted, now mostly converted into hotels or lodging-houses, half the year void of guests; but the majority of the dwellings are rather curious than splendid. Nearly all the larger ones are built in the form of an L, the lower line of the letter representing the street front, the upper line a shallow but lofty wing reaching far back from the main building at right angles, and flanked by an enormous green or brown cistern as by a round tower. A really imposing archway often pierces the street façade--giving carriageway into the deep court--much like those quaint archways characteristic of old London taverns. Such a building often possesses three sets of stairways--invariably two--one for the main edifice, one for the wing. But these immense winter residences, once