table, crucifix, and chair, was the rock of spiritual authority in the city. Ladies thronged it during the hours of audience. Betrothals, marriages, ill-favoured daughters and ill-moraled sons, contumacious slaves and light husbands, baptisms, funerals, and first communions, litigations about property, and dissensions about gossip; all the res disjectae of family affairs, were brought there to him by white and black, and by counsel he held and directed all as with consciousness of the infallibility attributed to him. At sight of his venerable appearance in the streets, with coarse brown cassock, rosary, sandaled feet, broad-brimmed hat, white beard, eyes cast down,—all uncovered. He died in 1829. His funeral procession included the whole city, and was a grand and momentous parade, the Free Masons attending by a special order of the Grand Lodge of the state. He was the last survivor of the old Capuchin mission in Louisiana, and he is still regarded as a saint by the secular world; but the clerical still remembers a story about an early love and a duel, and his defiance and insubordination, and the suspicion that he was not only a Free Mason, but one in high standing.
The old Spanish enforced respect for the church was sorely missed, not alone by the vicar-general. The lady abbess of the Ursulines, as the governor called her, was driven by the rising spirit of levity, if not of godlessness, to solicit the interference of the civil authorities to prevent the repeating of a performance at the theatre, in which her community was held up as an object of derision, the last act being marked, she said, with peculiar indecency and disrespect. Tradition says that the play was that one, still a favourite in the city, "Les Mousquetaires au Couvent." The governor
