Excerpt from The Price of Silence Prologue: A Domicillary Visit The narrow streets of the French Quarter resembled canals; the rain, descending from a sky which half an hour earlier had been as innocently blue as a baby's eyes, rolled in smoky waves down pointed roofs and spouted from projecting gutters; the slender arcs on either side interlaced in mid-air to plunge, a frothing column, into the rising flood below. Canal Street was for the moment a wide lagoon; the thoroughfares beyond sent up a reek of mud and ooze to meet the deluge. In the Garden District, magnolia and rose-bush cast upon miniature seas a vain sacrifice of snow-white and rose-red. The innumerable Confederate flags, which everywhere lent a bright touch of color to a background of brick and stucco, drooped, washed-out and lifeless, from staff, window-sill, and balcony. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.