“I ought to have asked you to my house sooner, perhaps, but I wasn’t ready. There were some little details that I wanted to arrange first.”
When the dinner evening came, the boys entered the stately mansion with more of embarrassment than they would have cared to confess. It was the finest house they had ever seen,—a stately, old-fashioned structure, with broad galleries running around three of its sides, and with a spacious colonnade in front. It stood in the midst of a garden of palm, ilex, and magnolia trees, occupying an entire city block, and shut in by a high brick wall, pierced by great gateways and little ones.
Inside, the house was luxuriously comfortable, filled with old-fashioned furniture, time-dulled pictures, and here and there a bit of statuary, but with none of that painfully breakable looking bric-a-brac that one finds so often and in such annoying profusion in the houses of the rich or the well-to-do. There was nothing here that meant show, nothing that did not suggest easy use and comfort.
Mr. Kennedy himself followed the servant to the door to receive his young friends. When he had ushered them into a homelike, “back-parlor” sort of a room, he excused himself for a brief time and left them. About a minute later they heard little feet pattering down the great hall, and, an instant later, “Baby” toddled in. She paused a moment, and then rushing into Phil’s arms called aloud:—
“My boys! My big boys!” Then she raised her little voice, and cried:—-
“Come, papa! Come, mamma! My boys is come!”
This was the “little detail” that Mr. Kennedy had waited to arrange. He had induced his sister and her husband to bring the children to New Orleans, to await the flood’s subsidence; and he had waited for their arrival before inviting the boys to dinner, in order that their welcome might be eager, and their enjoyment of his hospitality free from embarrassment.
In company with their flatboat guests, the lads felt completely at home, and perhaps their shrewdly kind host aided toward this result by having the dinner served in the most homelike and informal way that he could manage.
As the steamboat on which they were to “work their way” up the river was to sail the next afternoon, this evening at Mr. Kennedy’s was their last in New Orleans.
“And what a delightful finish it has been to all our experiences!” said Irv, when they all got back to their hotel.