The room was on the ground floor, and the house was an old-fashioned creole dwelling, long and low, with many doors and innumerable little staircases--everything in disorder and out of repair, and weeds and grass growing up to the threshold. There was a well-stocked and carefully-tended vegetable garden not a hundred yards off: the poultry-yards, dove-cotes and smoke-houses were as full as they could hold, and over yonder, just behind the tall picket fence, were corn-cribs bursting with corn and hay-lofts choked with hay. Fifty or sixty negro hovels, irregularly grouped together down by the bayou-side, and indistinctly seen in the fading twilight, contained about three hundred slaves, who, having trooped in from the field at the sound of the bell, were now eating pork and hominy as fast as they could swallow. But no one would have guessed that all this abundance was at hand, or that this was the homestead of one of the richest creole families in the State. Yet it was so. Old Madame Levassour--or Madame Hypolite, as she was invariably called--was not only the widow of a wealthy planter, but had been herself a great heiress, perhaps the greatest in the whole South, at the time of her marriage. The property had gone on appreciating, as slave property did in old times, and now that she was lying at the point of death, her two daughters, who had married brothers, and, like all true creoles, still lived at home with their mother, would soon be enormously rich. They were well off already by inheritance from their father, and each owned a valuable plantation and many slaves; but these were nothing compared to the possessions of their mother, who was an excellent business-woman, full of energy, prudence and moderation, and never weak or capricious, especially where the interests of others were concerned. She had always been a kind and indulgent mistress to her slaves, who loved her in return with passionate fidelity, and many were the sighs and tears their approaching change of owners produced among them. Her sons-in-law were educated men, of good birth and moderate fortune; but negroes are the best judges of character in the world, and there was not a trait or feeling concealed under the quiet, nonchalant exterior of Mons. Volmont Cherbuliez which they did not thoroughly understand. About his brother Alphège, who was a physician, there was more diversity of opinion. That he also was bad, cruel, dissipated, profoundly deceitful, there was no doubt in the minds of his future chattels, but what precise form his idiosyncrasies would take they felt to be uncertain, and gazed with terror--all the more acute for being somewhat vague--at his cold, impassive face. In the mean time, nothing could be more irreproachable than the demeanor of the two brothers. Dr. Alphège was known to be a man of great skill, a graduate of the medical schools of Paris and always interested in the practice of his profession. He devoted himself to his mother-in-law now with