Love's war was declared. From hour to hour of that night and the next morning, in bed, at board, dressing¹ for the thronged² city, spinning with Constance and Miranda up Love Street across Piety⁴ and Desire and on into the town's centre, Anna, outwardly all peace, planned that war's defensive⁵ strategy. Splendidly maidenly⁷ it should be, harrowingly arduous⁸ to the proud invader⁹, and long drawn¹⁰ out. Constance should see what a man can be put through. But oh, but oh, if, after all, the invasion should not come!

In those days New Orleans paved her favorite streets, when she paved them at all, with big blocks of granite¹¹ two feet by one. They came from the North as ballast in those innumerable wide-armed ships whose cloud of masts and cordage inspiringly darkened the sky of that far-winding river-front where we lately saw Hilary Kincaid and Fred Greenleaf ride. Beginning at the great steamboat landing, half a mile of Canal Street had such a pavement on either side of its broad grassy¹³ "neutral ground." So had the main streets that led from it at right angles. Long afterward¹⁴, even as late as when the Nineteenth Century died, some of those streets were at the funeral, clad in those same old pavements, worn as smooth and ragged¹⁵ as a gentleman-beggar's coat. St. Charles Street was one. Another was the old

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