Identifier: historicalsketch00hear (find matches)
Title: Historical sketch book and guide to New Orleans and environs, with map : illustrated with many original engravings, and containing exhaustive accounts of the traditions, historical legends, and remarkable localities of the Creole city
Year: 1885 (1880s)
Authors: Hearn, Lafcadio, 1850-1904 Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926
Subjects:
Publisher: New York : W.H. Coleman
Contributing Library: University of Connecticut Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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their eyes and winking knowingly, as ithey mightily enjoyed this novel pousse-cafe. A course of red-hot coals followed, which thechewed up \suth apparent gusto, gazing all the while at the Frenchman to see it he was suffciently astounded at them and their eccentric diet. They had succeeded. The Frenchman was absolutely horrified and begged for an explaujtion It was the Great Manitou, the savages insisted, that enabled them to be fire-eaters, anthey proposed that he should at once adopt their faith and discard his former religion anbreeches. This, however, he politely declined, with thanks. This so-called Manitou he subsequently identified as a root, savoyanne, whose juice pntected a man from any injury by fire. , He found also another plant of the same order which had the effect of solidifying watcThis plant, M. Baudry des Lozieres (First Voyage to Louisiana, page 175), also saw, so that thercan be no question about its actual existence and power, M. des Lozieres calls it a grass, an
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Jocks )(ega GUIDE TO NEW ORLEANS. 253 says it was known to the Creoles here by the name of semper virens, or evergreen, and that asingle drop of its juice, dropped into a cup of water, immediately froze it. But greatest of all in the vegetable kingdom—as man is greatest in the world—was the man-plant (Jiomme-plante). This plant was only once seen in Louisiana, or, for that matter, only onceseen in the world. M. B. des Lozieres, who gives the only account extant of it, did not see itiiimself, but got the story direct from Don Martin Xovar, Governor of Louisiana. Some Galician laborers were digging a ditch near the city, when suddenly one of themturned up with his spade something white. A closer glance at it showed him and his comrades:hat it was a corpse, the body of one who had evidently once been a beautiful girl. The laborersvvere quite horrified when a dozen more bodies of men, women and children were uneaithed,ill in a perfect state of preservation. Alarmed at this discovery o

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