Its dark, weatherbeaten roof and sides were hoisted up above the jungly plain in a distracted way, like a gigantic ammunition-wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some retreating army.

Around it was a dense growth of low water willows, with half a hundred sorts of thorny or fetid bushes, savage strangers alike to the "language of flowers" and to the botanist's Greek.

They were hung with countless strands of discolored and prickly smilax, and the impassable mud below bristled with _chevaux de frise_ of the dwarf palmetto.

Two lone forest-trees, dead cypresses, stood in the centre of the marsh, dotted with roosting vultures.

The shallow strips of water were hid by myriads of aquatic plants, under whose coarse and spiritless flowers, could one have seen it, was a harbor of reptiles, great and small, to make one shudder to the end of his days.
The house was on a slightly raised spot, the levee of a draining canal.
The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of big, ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers.
Such was the home of old Jean Marie Poquelin, once an opulent indigo planter, standing high in the esteem of his small, proud circle of exclusively male acquaintances in the old city; now a hermit, alike shunned by and shunning all who had ever known him.