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“I am not colored! We are Spanish, and my brother will call on you and prove it.” She is allowed to stay.

At length the roll-call is done. “Now, madam, you will dismiss these pupils that we have set aside, at once. We will go down and wait to see that they come out.” The men tramped out of the room, went down-stairs, and rejoined the impatient crowd that was clamoring in the street.

Then followed a wild scene within the old house. Restraint was lost. Terror ruled. The girls who had been ordered into the street sobbed and shrieked and begged:

“Oh, save us! We cannot go out there; the mob will kill us! What shall we do?”

One girl of grand and noble air, as dark and handsome as an East Indian princess, and standing first in her class for scholarship, threw herself at her teacher’s feet, crying, “Have pity on me, Miss —-!”

“My poor Leontine,” replied the teacher, “what can I do? There are good ‘colored’ schools in the city; would it not have been wiser for your father to send you to one of them?”

But the girl rose up and answered:

“Must I go to school with my own servants to escape an unmerited disdain?” And the teacher was silent, while the confusion increased.

“The shame of it will kill me!” cried gentle Eugenie L—-. And thereupon, at last, a teacher, commonly one of the sternest in discipline, exclaimed:

“If Eugenie goes, Marcelline shall go, if I have to put her out myself! Spanish, indeed! And Eugenie a pearl by the side of her!”

Just then Eugenie’s father came. He had forced his way through the press in the street, and now stood bidding his child have courage and return with him the way he had come.

“Tie your veil close, Eugenie,” said the teacher, “and they will not know you.” And so they went, the father and the daughter. But they went alone. None followed. This roused the crowd to noisy anger.

“Why don’t the rest come?” it howled. But the teachers tried in vain to inspire the panic-stricken girls with courage to face the mob, and were in despair, when a school official arrived, and with calm and confident authority bade the expelled girls gather in ranks and follow him through the crowd. So they went out through the iron gates, the great leaves of which closed after them with a rasping of their key and shooting of their bolts, while a teacher said:

“Come; the reporters will soon be here. Let us go and see after Marguerite.”

They found her in the room of the janitress, shut in and fast asleep.

“Do you think,” one asked of the janitress, “that mere fright and the loss of that comb made this strong girl ill?”

“No. I think she must have guessed those men’s errand, and her eye met the eye of some one who knew her.”

“But what of that?”

“She is ‘colored.'”

“Impossible!”

“I tell you, yes!”

“Why, I thought her as pure German as her name.”

“No, the mixture is there; though the only trace of it is on her lips. Her mother–she is dead now–was a beautiful quadroon. A German sea-captain loved her. The law stood between them. He opened a vein in his arm, forced in some of her blood, went to court, swore he had African blood, got his license, and married her. Marguerite is engaged to be married to a white man, a gentleman who does not know this. It was like life and death, so to speak, for her not to let those men turn her out of here.”

The teacher turned away, pondering.

The eviction did not, at that time, hold good. The political struggle went on, fierce and bitter. The “Radical” government was doomed, but not dead. A few weeks after the scene just described the evicted girls were reinstated. A long term of suspense followed. The new year became the old and went out. Twice this happened. In 1877 there were two governors and two governments in Louisiana. In sight from the belvedere of the “haunted house,” eight squares away up Royal street, in the State House, the de facto government was shut up under close military siege by the de jure government, and the Girls’ High School in Madame Lalaurie’s old house, continuing faithfully their daily sessions, knew with as little certainty to which of the two they belonged as though New Orleans had been some Italian city of the fifteenth century. But to guess the White League, was not far from right, and in April the Radical government expired.

A Democratic school-board came in. June brought Commencement day, and some of the same girls who had been evicted in 1874 were graduated by the new Board in 1877. During the summer the schools and school-laws were overhauled, and in September or October the high school was removed to another place, where each pupil suspected of mixed blood was examined officially behind closed doors and only those who could prove white or Indian ancestry were allowed to stay. A “colored” high school was opened in Madame Lalaurie’s house with a few pupils. It lasted one session, maybe two, and then perished.

In 1882 the “haunted house” had become a Conservatory of Music. Chamber concerts were frequent in Madame Lalaurie’s old dining-hall. On a certain sweet evening in the spring of that year there sat among those who had gathered to hear the haunted place filled with a deluge of sweet sounds one who had been a teacher there when the house had been, as some one–Conservative or Radical, who can tell which?–said on the spot, “for the second time purged of its iniquities.” The scene was “much changed,” says the auditor; but the ghosts were all there, walking on the waves of harmony. And thickest and fastest they trooped in and out when a passionate song thrilled the air with the promise that

“Some day–some day
Eyes clearer grown the truth may see.”