"I never wanted you to get her, my dear boy; she is not your kind at all—nay, now, let me say it, since I have kept it unsaid so long and patiently. Do you imagine she could ever understand an unselfish life, or even one that tried to be unselfish? She makes an excellent Madame 'Thanase. 'Thanase is a good, vigorous, faithful, gentle animal, that knows how to graze and lie in the shade and get up and graze again. But you—it is not in you to know how poor a Madame Bonaventure she would have been; not now merely, but poorer and poorer as the years go by.

"And so I say, do not go away. I know why you want to go; you want to run away from a haunting thought that some unlikely accident or other may leave Madame 'Thanase a widow, and you step into his big shoes. They would not fit. Do not go. That thing is not going to happen; and the way to get rid of the troublesome notion is to stay and see yourself outgrow it—and her."

Bonaventure shook his head mournfully, but staid. From time to time Madame 'Thanase passed before his view in pursuit of her outdoor and indoor cares. But even when he came under her galerie roof he could see that she never doubted she had made the very best choice in all Carancro.

And yet people knew—she knew—that Bonaventure not only enjoyed the acquaintance, but sometimes actually went from one place to another on the business, of the great ex-governor. Small matters they may have been, but, anyhow, just think!

Sometimes as he so went or came he saw her squatting on a board at the edge of a coolee, her petticoat wrapped snugly around her limbs, and a limp sunbonnet hiding her nut-brown face, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle. She was her own housekeeper, chambermaid, cook, washerwoman, gooseherd, seamstress, nurse, and all the rest. Her floors, they said, were always bien fourbis (well scrubbed); her beds were high, soft, snug, and covered with the white mesh of her own crochet-needle.

He saw her the oftener because she worked much out on her low veranda. From that place she had a broad outlook upon the world, with 'Thanase in the foreground, at his toil, sometimes at his sport. His cares as a herder, vacheur,—vache, he called it,—were wherever his slender-horned herds might roam or his stallions lead their mares in search of the sweetest herbage; and when rains filled the maraises, and the cold nor'westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal—with sometimes the canvas-back—and the poules-d'eau—the water-hens and the rails, and the cache-cache—the snipe—were as likely to settle or rise just before his own house as elsewhere, and the most devastating shot that hurtled through those feathered multitudes was that sent by her husband—hers—her own—possessive case—belonging to her. She was proud of her property.

Sometimes la vieille—for she was la vieille from the very day that she counted her wedding presents, mostly chickens, and turned them loose in the dooryard—sometimes she enjoyed the fine excitement of seeing her vieux catching and branding his yearling colts. Small but not uncomely they were: tougher, stronger, better when broken, than the mustang, though, like the mustang, begotten and foaled on the open prairie. Often she saw him catch two for the plough in the morning, turn them loose at noon to find their own food and drink, and catch and work another pair through the afternoon. So what did not give her pride gave her quiet comfort. Sometimes she looked forth with an anxious eye, when a colt was to be broken for the saddle; for as its legs were untied, and it sprang to its feet with 'Thanase in the saddle, and the blindfold was removed from its eyes, the strain on the young wife's nerves was as much as was good, to see the creature's tremendous leaps in air and not tremble for its superb, unmovable rider.

Could scholarship be finer than—or as fine as—such horsemanship? And yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zosephine, like all the rest of Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious, half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody's love or lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassioned way, everybody's; landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all his learning—for he could read and write in two languages and took the Vermilionville newspaper—and with all his books, almost an entire mantel-shelf full—he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zosephine found her eyes, so to speak, lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture, she had cast it aside now—as to herself; her children—oh! yes; but that would be by and by.

Even of pastimes and sports she saw almost none. For 'Thanase there was, first of all, his fiddle; then la chasse, the chase; the papegaie, or, as he called it, pad-go—the shooting-match; la galloche, pitch-farthing; the cock-fight; the five-arpent pony-race; and too often, also, chin-chin, twenty-five-cent poker, and the gossip and glass of the roadside "store." But for Madame 'Thanase there was only a seat against the wall at the Saturday-night dance, and mass a la chapelle once in two or three weeks; these, and infant baptisms. These showed how fast time and life were hurrying along. The wedding seemed but yesterday, and yet here was little Sosthene, and tiny Marguerite, and cooing Zosephine the younger—how fast history repeats itself!

But one day, one Sunday, it repeated itself in a different way. 'Thanase was in gay humor that morning. He kissed his wife, tossed his children, played on his fiddle that tune they all liked best, and, while Zosephine looked after him with young zest in her eye, sprang into the saddle and galloped across the prairie a la chapelle to pass a jolly forenoon at chin-chin in the village grocery.

Since the war almost every one went armed—not for attack, of course; for defence. 'Thanase was an exception.

"My fists," he said, in the good old drawling Acadian dialect and with his accustomed smile,—"my fists will take care of me."

One of the party that made up the game with 'Thanase was the fellow whom you may remember as having brought that first news of 'Thanase from camp to Carancro, and whom Zosephine had discredited. The young husband had never liked him since.

But, as I say, 'Thanase was in high spirits. His jests came thick and fast, and some were hard and personal, and some were barbed with truth, and one, at length, ended in the word "deserter." The victim grew instantly fierce and red, leaped up crying "Liar," and was knocked backward to the ground by the long-reaching fist of 'Thanase. He rose again and dashed at his assailant. The rest of the company hastily made way to right and left, chairs were overturned, over went the table, the cards were underfoot. Men ran in from outside and from over the way. The two foes clash together, 'Thanase smites again with his fist, and the other grapples. They tug and strain—

"Separate them!" cry two or three of the packed crowd in suppressed earnestness. "Separate them! Bonaventure is coming! And here from the other side the cure too! Oh, get them apart!" But the half-hearted interference is shaken off. 'Thanase sees Bonaventure and the cure enter; mortification smites him; a smothered cry of rage bursts from his lips; he tries to hurl his antagonist from him; and just as the two friends reach out to lay hands upon the wrestling mass, it goes with a great thud to the ground. The crowd recoils and springs back again; then a cry of amazement and horror from all around, the arm of the under man lifted out over the back of the other, a downward flash of steel—another—and another! the long, subsiding wail of a strong man's sudden despair, the voice of one crying,—

"Zosephine! Ah! Zosephine! ma vieille! ma vieille!"—one long moan and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead.

Poor old Sosthene and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain. Day and night she put them away in fierce grief and silence, or if she spoke wailed always the one implacable answer,—

"I want my husband!" And to the cure the same words,—

"Go tell God I want my husband!"

But when at last came one who, having come to speak, could only hold her hand in his and silently weep with her, she clung to his with both her own, and looking up into his young, thin face, cried,—not with grace of words, and yet with some grace in all her words' Acadian ruggedness,—

"Bonaventure! Ah! Bonaventure! thou who knowest the way—teach me, my brother, how to be patient."

And so—though the ex-governor had just offered him a mission in another part of the Acadians' land, a mission, as he thought, far beyond his deserving, though, in fact, so humble that to tell you what it was would force your smile—he staid.

A year went by, and then another. Zosephine no longer lifted to heaven a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of which he was so fond he put forward—though ever so impersonally and counting himself least of all to have attained—the precepts of self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of the lip, she would slowly shake her head and say:

"It is of no use; I can't do it! I may be too young—I may be too bad, but—I can't learn it!"

At last, one September evening, Bonaventure stood at the edge of Sosthene's galerie, whither Zosephine had followed out, leaving le vieux and la vieille in the house. On the morrow Bonaventure was to leave Carancro. And now he said,—

"Zosephine, I must go."

"Ah, Bonaventure!" she replied, "my children—what will my children do? It is not only that you have taught them to spell and read, though God will be good to you for that! But these two years you have been every thing to them—every thing. They will be orphaned over again, Bonaventure." Tears shone in her eyes, and she turned away her face with her dropped hands clasped together.

The young man laid his hand upon her drooping brow. She turned again and lifted her eyes to his. His lips moved silently, but she read upon them the unheard utterance: it was a word of blessing and farewell. Slowly and tenderly she drew down his hand, laid a kiss upon it, and said,—

"Adjieu—adjieu," and they parted.

As Zosephine, with erect form and firm, clear tread, went by her parents and into the inner room where her children lay in their trundle-bed, the old mother said to le vieux,—

"You can go ahead and repair the schoolhouse now. Our daughter will want to begin, even to-morrow, to teach the children of the village—les zonfants a la chapelle."

"You think so?" said Sosthene, but not as if he doubted.

"Yes; it is certain now that Zosephine will always remain the Widow 'Thanase."



GRANDE POINTE.



CHAPTER I.

A STRANGER.

From College Point to Bell's Point, sixty miles above New Orleans, the Mississippi runs nearly from west to east. Both banks, or "coasts," are lined with large and famous sugar-plantations. Midway on the northern side, lie the beautiful estates of "Belmont" and "Belle Alliance." Early one morning in the middle of October, 1878, a young man, whose age you would have guessed fifteen years too much, stood in scrupulously clean, ill-fitting, flimsy garments, on the strong, high levee overlooking these two plantations. He was asking the way to a place called Grande Pointe. Grand Point, he called it, and so may we: many names in Louisiana that retain the French spelling are habitually given an English pronunciation.

A tattered negro mounted on a sunburnt, unshod, bare-backed mule, down in the dusty gray road on the land-side of the embankment, was his only hearer. Fifteen years earlier these two men, with French accents, strangers to each other, would hardly have conversed in English; but the date made the difference. We need not inexorably render the dialect of the white man; pretty enough to hear, it would often be hideous to print. The letter r, for instance, that plague of all nations—before consonants it disappeared; before vowels the tongue failed of that upward curve that makes the good strong r's of Italy and Great Britain.

The negro pointed over his mule's ears.

"You see Belle Alliance sugah-house yondeh? Well, behine dah you fine one road go stret thoo the plantation till de wood. Dass 'bout mile, you know. Den she keep stret on thoo de wood 'bout two mile' mo', an' dat fetch you at Gran' Point'. Hole on; I show you."

The two men started down the road, the negro on his mule, the stranger along the levee's crown.

"Dat Gran' Point'," resumed the black; "'tain't no point on de riveh, you know, like dat Bell' Point, w'at you see yondeh 'twixt dem ah batture willows whah de sun all spread out on the wateh; no, seh. 'Tis jis lil place back in de swamp, raise' 'bout five, six feet 'bove de wateh. Yes, seh; 'bout t'ree mile' long, 'alf mile wide. Don't nobody but Cajun'[1] live back dah. Seem droll you goin' yondeh."

[1] Acadians.

"'Tis the reason I go," said the other, without looking up.

"Yes, seh."—A short silence.—"Dass nigh fifty year', now, dat place done been settle'. Ole 'Mian Roussel he was gret hunter. He know dat place. He see 'tis rich groun'. One day he come dare, cut some tree', buil' house, plant lil tobahcah. Nex' year come ole man Le Blanc; den Poche, den St. Pierre, den Martin,—all Cajun'. Oh! dass mo'n fifty year' 'go. Dey all comes from dis yeh riveh coast; 'caze de rich Creole', dey buy 'em out. Yes, seh, dat use' be de Cote Acadien', right yeh whar yo' feet stan'in' on. C'est la cote Acadien', just ici, oui." The trudging stranger waived away the right of translation. He had some reason for preferring English. But his manner was very gentle, and in a moment the negro began again.

"Gret place, dat Gran' Point'. Yes, seh; fo' tobahcah. Dey make de bes' Perique tobahcah in de worl'. Yes, seh, right yond' at Gran' Point'; an' de bes' Perique w'at come from Gran' Point', dass de Perique of Octave Roussel, w'at dey use call 'im Chat-oue;[2] but he git tired dat name, and now he got lil boy 'bout twenny-five year' ole, an' dey call de ole man Catou, an' call his lil boy Chat-oue. Dey fine dat wuck mo' betteh. Yes, seh. An' he got bruddeh name' 'Mian Roussel. But dat not de ole, ole 'Mian—like dey say de ole he one. 'Caze, you know, he done peg out. Oh, yes, he peg out in de du'in' o' de waugh.[3] But he lef' heap-sight chillen; you know, he got a year' staht o' all de res', you know. Yes, seh. Dey got 'bout hund'ed fifty peop' yond' by Gran' Point', and sim like dey mos' all name Roussel. Sim dat way to me. An' ev'y las' one got a lil fahm so lil you can't plow her; got dig her up wid a spade. Yes, seh, same like you diggin' grave; yes, seh."

[2] Raccoon.

[3] During the war.

The gentle stranger interrupted, still without lifting his eyes from the path. "'Tis better narrowness of land than of virtue." The negro responded eagerly:

"Oh, dey good sawt o' peop', yes. Dey deals fair an' dey deals square. Dey keeps de peace. Dass 'caze dey mos'ly don't let whisky git on deir blin' side, you know. Dey does love to dance, and dey marries mawnstus young; but dey not like some niggehs: dey stays married. An' modess? Dey dess so modess dey shy! Yes, seh, dey de shyes', easy-goin'es', modesses', most p'esumin' peop' in de whole worl'! I don't see fo' why folks talk 'gin dem Cajun'; on'y dey a lil bit slow."

The traveller on the levee's top suddenly stood still, a soft glow on his cheek, a distension in his blue eyes. "My friend, what was it, the first American industry? Was it not the Newfoundland fisheries? Who inaugu'ate them, if not the fishermen of Normandy and Bretagne? And since how long? Nearly fo' hundred years!"

"Dass so, boss," exclaimed the negro with the promptitude of an eye-witness; but the stranger continued:—

"The ancestors of the Acadian'—they are the fathers of the codfish!" He resumed his walk.

"Dass so, seh; dass true. Yes, seh, you' talkin' mighty true; dey a pow'ful ancestrified peop', dem Cajun'; dass w'at make dey so shy, you know. An' dey mighty good han' in de sugah-house. Dey des watchin', now, w'en dat sugah-cane git ready fo' biggin to grind; so soon dey see dat, dey des come a-lopin' in here to Mistoo Wallis' sugah-house here at Belle Alliance, an' likewise to Marse Louis Le Bourgeois yond' at Belmont. You see! de fust t'ing dey gwine ass you when you come at Gran' Point'—'Is Mistoo Wallis biggin to grind?' Well, seh, like I tell you, yeh de sugah-house, an' dah de road. Dat road fetch you at Gran' Point'."



CHAPTER II.

IN A STRANGE LAND.

An hour later the stranger, quite alone, had left behind him the broad smooth road, between rustling walls of sugar-cane, that had brought him through Belle Alliance plantation. The way before him was little more than a bridle-path along the earth thrown up beside a draining-ditch in a dense swamp. The eye could run but a little way ere it was confused by the tangle of vegetation. The trees of the all-surrounding forest—sweet-gums, water-oaks, magnolias—cast their shade obliquely along and across his way, and wherever it fell the undried dew still sparkled on the long grass.

A pervading whisper seemed to say good-by to the great human world. Scarce the note of an insect joined with his footsteps in the coarse herbage to break the stillness. He made no haste. Ferns were often about his feet, and vines were both there and everywhere. The soft blue tufts of the ageratum were on each side continually. Here and there in wet places clumps of Indian-shot spread their pale scroll leaves and sent up their green and scarlet spikes. Of stature greater than his own the golden-rod stood, crested with yellow plumes, unswayed by the still air. Often he had to push apart the brake-canes and press through with bowed head. Nothing met him in the path. Now and then there were faint signs underfoot as if wheels might have crushed the ragged turf long weeks before. Now and then the print of a hoof was seen in the black soil, but a spider had made it her home and spread across it her silken snares. If he halted and hearkened, he heard far away the hawk screaming to his mate, and maybe, looking up, caught a glimpse of him sailing in the upper air with the sunlight glowing in his pinions; or in some bush near by heard the soft rustle of the wren, or the ruffling whiff and nervous "chip" of the cardinal, or saw for an instant the flirt of his crimson robes as he rattled the stiff, jagged fans of the palmetto.

At length the path grew easier and lighter, the woods on the right gave place to a field half claimed for cotton and half given up to persimmon saplings, blackberry-bushes, and rampant weeds. A furry pony with mane and tail so loaded with cockleburs that he could not shake them, lifted his head and stared. A moment afterward the view opened to right and left, and the path struck a grassy road at right angles and ended. Just there stood an aged sow.

"Unclean one," said the grave wayfarer, "where dwells your master?—Ignore you the English tongue? But I shall speak not in another; 'tis that same that I am arriving to bring you."

The brute, with her small bestial eye fixed on him distrustfully and askance, moved enough to the right to let him pass on the other hand, and with his coat on his arm—so strong was the October sun—he turned into the road westward, followed one or two of its slight curves, and presently saw neat fields on either hand, walled in on each farther side by the moss-hung swamp; and now a small, gray, unpainted house, then two or three more, the roofs of others peering out over the dense verdure, and down at the end of the vista a small white spire and cross. Then, at another angle, two men seated on the roadside. Their diffident gaze bore that look of wild innocence that belongs to those who see more of dumb nature than of men. Their dress was homespun. The older was about fifty years old, the other much younger.

"Sirs, have I already reach Gran' Point'?"

The older replied in an affirmative that could but just be heard, laid back a long lock of his straight brown hair after the manner of a short-haired girl, and rose to his feet.

"I hunt," said the traveller slowly, "Mr. Maximian Roussel."

A silent bow.

"'Tis you?"

The same motion again.

The traveller produced a slip of paper folded once and containing a line or two of writing hastily pencilled that morning at Belle Alliance. Maximian received it timidly and held it helplessly before his downcast eyes with the lines turned perpendicularly, while the pause grew stifling, and until the traveller said:—

"'Tis Mr. Wallis make that introduction."

At the name of the owner of the beautiful plantation the man who had not yet spoken rose, covered with whittlings. It was like a steer getting up out of the straw. He spoke.

"M'sieu' Walleece, a commence a mouliner? Is big-in to gryne?"

"He shall commence in the centre of the next week."

Maximian's eyes rose slowly from the undeciphered paper. The traveller's met them. He pointed to the missive.

"The schoolmaster therein alluded—'tis me."

"Oh!" cried the villager joyously, "maitre d'ecole!—schooltitcher!"

"But," said the stranger, "not worthy the title." He accepted gratefully the hand of one and then of the other.

"Walk een!" said Maximian, "all hand', walk een house." They went, Indian file, across the road, down a sinuous footpath, over a stile, and up to his little single-story unpainted house, and tramped in upon the railed galerie.

"Et M'sieu' Le Bourgeois," said the host, as the schoolmaster accepted a split-bottomed chair, "he's big-in to gryne?"

Within this ground-floor veranda—chief appointment of all Acadian homes—the traveller accepted a drink of water in a blue tumbler, brought by the meek wife. The galerie just now was scattered with the husband's appliances for making Perique tobacco into "carats"—the carat-press. Its small, iron-ratcheted, wooden windlass extended along the top rail of the balustrade across one of the galerie's ends. Lines of half-inch grass rope, for wrapping the carats into diminished bulk and solid shape, lay along under foot. Beside one of the doors, in deep hickory baskets, were the parcels of cured tobacco swaddled in cotton cloths and ready for the torture of ropes and windlass. From the joists overhead hung the pods of tobacco-seed for next year's planting.



CHAPTER III.

THE HANDSHAKING.

There was news in Grande Pointe. The fair noon sky above, with its peaceful flocks of clouds; the solemn, wet forest round about; the harvested fields; the dishevelled, fragrant fallows; the reclining, ruminating cattle; the little chapel of St. Vincent de Paul in the midst, open for mass once a fortnight, for a sermon in French four times a year,—these were not more tranquil in the face of the fact that a schoolmaster had come to Grande Pointe to stay than outwardly appeared the peaceful-minded villagers. Yet as the tidings floated among the people, touching and drifting on like thistle-down, they were stirred within, and came by ones, by twos, slow-stepping, diffidently smiling, to shake hands with the young great man. They wiped their own before offering them—the men on their strong thighs, the women on their aprons. Children came, whose courage would carry them no nearer than the galerie's end or front edge, where they lurked and hovered, or gazed through the balustrade, or leaned against a galerie post and rubbed one brown bare foot upon another and crowded each other's shoulders without assignable cause, or lopped down upon the grass and gazed from a distance.

Little conversation was offered. The curiosity was as unobtrusive as the diffidence was without fear; and when a villager's soft, low speech was heard, it was generally in answer to inquiries necessary for one to make who was about to assume the high office of educator. Moreover, the schoolmaster revealed, with all gentleness, his preference for the English tongue, and to this many could only give ear. Only two or three times did the conversation rise to a pitch that kindled even the ready ardor of the young man of letters. Once, after a prolonged silence, the host, having gazed long upon his guest, said, without preface:—

"Tough jawb you got," and waved a hand toward the hovering children.

"Sir," replied the young scholar, "is it not the better to do whilse it is the mo' tough? The mo' toughness, the mo' honor." He rose suddenly, brushed back the dry, brown locks of his fine hair, and extending both hands, with his limp straw hat dangling in one, said: "Sir, I will ask you; is not the schoolmaster the true patriot? Shall his honor be less than that of the soldier? Yet I ask not honor; for me, I am not fit; yet, after my poor capacities"—He resumed his seat.

An awesome quiet followed. Then some one spoke to him, too low to be heard. He bent forward to hear the words repeated, and 'Mian said for the timorous speaker:—

"Aw, dass nut'n; he jis only say, 'Is M'sieu' Walleece big-in to gryne?'"

Few tarried long, though one man—he whom the schoolmaster had found sitting on the roadside with Maximian—staid all day; and even among the villagers themselves there was almost no loquacity. Maximian, it is true, as the afternoon wore along, and it seemed plain that the reception was a great and spontaneous success, spoke with growing frequency and heartiness; and, when the guest sat down alone at a table within, where la vieille—the wife—was placing half-a-dozen still sputtering fried eggs, a great wheaten loaf, a yellow gallon bowl of boiled milk, a pewter ladle, a bowie-knife, the blue tumbler, and a towel; and out on the galerie the callers were still coming: his simple neighbors pardoned the elation that led him to take a chair himself a little way off, sit on it sidewise, cross his legs gayly, and with a smile and wave of his good brown hand say:—

"Servez-vous! He'p you'se'f! Eat much you like; till you swell up!"

Even he asked no questions. Only near the end of the day, when the barefoot children by gradual ventures had at length gathered close about and were softly pushing for place on his knees, and huddling under his arms, and he was talking French,—the only language most of them knew,—he answered the first personal inquiry put to him since arriving. "His name," he replied to the tiny, dark, big-eyed boy who spoke for his whispering fellows, "his name was Bonaventure—Bonaventure Deschamps."

As the great October sun began to dip his crimson wheel behind the low black line of swamp, and the chapel cross stood out against a band of yellow light that spanned the west, he walked out to see the village, a little girl on either hand and little boys round about. The children talked apace. Only the girl whose hand he held in his right was mute. She was taller than the rest; yet it was she to whom the little big-eyed boy pointed when he said, vain of his ability to tell it in English:—

"I don't got but eight year' old, me. I'm gran' for my age; but she, she not gran' for her age—Sidonie; no; she not gran' at all for her age."

They told the story of the chapel: how some years before, in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at the parish seat a few miles away on the Mississippi, a nun had by the Pope's leave cast off the veil; how she had come to Grande Pointe and taken charge of her widowed brother's children; and how he had died, and she had found means, the children knew not how, to build this chapel. And now she was buried under it, they said. It seemed, from what they left unsaid as well as what they said, that the simple influence of her presence had kindled a desire for education in Grande Pointe not known before.

"Dass my tante—my hant. She was my hant befo' she die'," said the little man of eight years, hopping along the turf in front of the rest. He dropped into a walk that looked rapid, facing round and moving backward. "She learn me English, my tante. And she try to learn Sidonie; but Sidonie, Sidonie fine that too strong to learn, that English, Sidonie." He hopped again, talking as he hopped, and holding the lifted foot in his hand. He could do that and speak English at the same time, so talented was Toutou.

Thus the sun went down. And at Maximian's stile again Bonaventure Deschamps took the children's cheeks into his slender fingers and kissed them, one by one, beginning at the least, and so up, slowly, toward Sidonie Le Blanc. With very earnest tenderness it was done, some grave word of inspiration going before each caress; but when at last he said, "To-morrow, dear chil'run, the school-bell shall ring in Gran' Point'!" and turned to finish with Sidonie—she was gone.



CHAPTER IV.

HOW THE CHILDREN RANG THE BELL.

Where the fields go wild and grow into brakes, and the soil becomes fenny, on the north-western edge of Grande Pointe, a dark, slender thread of a bayou moves loiteringly north-eastward into a swamp of huge cypresses. In there it presently meets another like itself, the Bayou Tchackchou, slipping around from the little farm village's eastern end as silently as a little mother comes out of a bower where she has just put her babe to sleep. A little farther on they are joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed, blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens. From Lake Maurepas one can go up Amite or Tickfaw River, or to Pass Manchac or Pontchatoula, anywhere in the world, in fact,—where a canoe can go.

On a bank of this bayou, no great way from Grande Pointe, but with the shadow of the swamp at its back and a small, bright prairie of rushes and giant reeds stretching away from the opposite shore, stood, more in the water than on the land, the palmetto-thatched fishing and hunting lodge and only home of a man who on the other side of the Atlantic you would have known for a peasant of Normandy, albeit he was born in this swamp,—the man who had tarried all day at the schoolmaster's handshaking.

What a day that had been! Once before he had witnessed a positive event. That was when, one day, he journeyed purposely to the levee of Belle Alliance, waited from morning till evening, and at last saw the steamer "Robert E. Lee" come by, and, as fortune would have it, land! loaded with cotton from the water to the hurricane deck. He had gone home resolved from that moment to save his money, and be something more than he was.

But that event had flashed before his eyes, and in a quarter-hour was gone, save in his memory. The coming of the schoolmaster, all unforeseen, had lasted a day, and he had seen it from beginning to end. All day long on 'Mian's galerie, standing now here, now there, he had got others to interpret for him, where he could not guess, the meanings of the wise and noble utterances that fell every now and then from the lips of the young soldier of learning, and stored them away in his now greedy mind.

One saying in particular, whose originality he did not dream of questioning, took profound hold of his conviction and admiration; and two or three times that evening, as his canoe glided homeward in the twilight, its one long, smooth ripple gleaming on this side and that as it widened away toward the bayou's dark banks, he rested for a moment on his tireless paddle, and softly broke the silence of the wilderness with its three simple words, so trite to our ears, so strange to his:—

"Knowledge is power."

In years he was but thirty-five; but he was a widower, and the one son who was his only child and companion would presently be fourteen.

"Claude," he said, as they rose that evening from their hard supper in the light and fumes of their small kerosene-lamp, "I' faut z-ahler coucher." (We must go to bed.)

"Quofoir?" asked the sturdy lad. (Pourquoi? Why?)

"Because," replied the father in the same strange French in which he had begun, "at daybreak to-morrow, and every day thereafter, you must be in your dug-out on your way to Grande Pointe, to school. My son, you are going to learn how to read!"

So came it that, until their alphabetical re-arrangement, the first of all the thirty-five names on the roll was Claude St. Pierre, and that every evening thenceforward when that small kerosene-lamp glimmered in the deep darkness of Bayou des Acadiens, the abecedarian Claude was a teacher.

But even before the first rough roll was made he was present, under the little chapel-tower, when for the first time its bell rang for school. The young master was there, and all the children; so that really there was nothing to ring the bell for. They could, all together, have walked quietly across the village green to the forlorn tobacco-shed that 'Mian had given them for a schoolhouse, and begun the session. Ah! say not so! It was good to ring the bell. A few of the stronger lads would even have sent the glad clang abroad before the time, but Bonaventure restrained them. For one thing, there must be room for every one to bear a hand. So he tied above their best reach three strands of "carat" cord to the main rope. Even then he was not ready.

"No, dear chil'run; but grasp hold, every one, the ropes, the cawds,—the shawt chil'run reaching up shawtly, the long chil'run the more longly."

Few understood his words, but they quietly caught the idea, and yielded themselves eagerly to his arranging hand. The highest grasp was Claude's. There was a little empty space under it, and then one only of Sidonie's hands, timid, smooth, and brown. And still the master held back the word.

"Not yet! not yet! The pear is not ripe!" He stood apart from them, near the chapel-door, where the light was strong, his silver watch open in his left hand, his form erect, his right hand lifted to the brim of his hat, his eyes upon the dial.

"Not yet, dear chil'run. Not yet. Two minute mo'.—Be ready.—Not yet!—One minute mo'!—Have the patience. Hold every one in his aw her place. Be ready! Have the patience." But at length when the little ones were frowning and softly sighing with the pain of upheld arms, their waiting eyes saw his dilate. "Be ready!" he said, with low intensity: "Be ready!" He soared to his tiptoes, the hat flounced from his head and smote his thigh, his eyes turned upon them blazing, and he cried, "Ring, chil'run, ring!"

The elfin crew leaped up the ropes and came crouching down. The bell pealed; the master's hat swung round his head. His wide eyes were wet, and he cried again, "Ring! ring! for God, light, libbutty, education!" He sprang toward the leaping, sinking mass; but the right feeling kept his own hands off. And up and down the children went, the bell answering from above, peal upon peal; when just as they had caught the rhythm of Claude's sturdy pull, and the bell could sound no louder, the small cords gave way from their fastenings, the little ones rolled upon their backs, the bell gave one ecstatic double clang and turned clear over, the swift rope straightened upward from its coil, and Claude and Sidonie, her hands clasped upon each other about the rope and his hands upon hers, shot up three times as high as their finest leap could have carried them. For an instant they hung; then with another peal the bell turned back and they came blushing to the floor. A swarm of hands darted to the rope, but Bonaventure's was on it first.

"'Tis sufficient!" he said, his face all triumph. The bell gave a lingering clang or two and ceased, and presently the happy company walked across the green. "Sufficient," the master had said; but it was more than sufficient. In that moment of suspension, with Sidonie's great brown frightened eyes in his, and their four hands clasped together, Claude had learned, for his first lesson, that knowledge is not the only or the greatest power.



CHAPTER V.

INVITED TO LEAVE.

After that, every school-day morning Claude rang the bell. Always full early his pirogue came gliding out of the woods and up through the bushy fen to the head of canoe navigation and was hauled ashore. Bonaventure had fixed his home near the chapel and not far from Claude's landing-place. Thus the lad could easily come to his door each morning at the right moment—reading it by hunter's signs in nature's book—to get the word to ring. There were none of the usual reasons that the schoolmaster should live close to the schoolhouse. There was no demand for its key.

Not of that schoolhouse! A hundred feet length by twenty-five breadth, of earth-floored, clapboard-roofed, tumbling shed, rudely walled with cypress split boards,—pieux,—planted endwise in the earth, like palisades, a hand-breadth space between every two, and sunlight and fresh air and the gleams of green fields coming in; the scores of little tobacco-presses that had stood in ranks on the hard earth floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor left; bold gaps here and there in the pieux, made by that mild influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and five or six desks, strong, home-made, sixty-four pounders.

Life had broadened with Claude in two directions. On one side opened, fair and noble, the acquaintanceship of Bonaventure Deschamps, a man who had seen the outside world, a man of books, of learning, a man who could have taught even geography, had there been any one to learn it; and on the other side, like a garden of roses and spices, the schoolmateship of Sidonie Le Blanc. To you and me she would have seemed the merest little brown sprout of a thing, almost nothing but two big eyes—like a little owl. To Claude it seemed as though nothing older or larger could be so exactly in the prime of beauty; the path to learning was the widest, floweriest, fragrantest path he had ever trod.

Sidonie did not often speak with him. At recess she usually staid at her desk, studying, quite alone but for Bonaventure silently busy at his, and Claude himself, sitting farther away, whenever the teacher did not see him and drive him to the playground. If he would only drive Sidonie out! But he never did.

One day, after quite a contest of learning, and as the hour of dismission was scattering the various groups across the green, Toutou, the little brother who was grand for his age, said to Claude, hanging timidly near Sidonie:—

"Alle est plus smart' que vous." (She is smarter than you.)

Whereupon Sidonie made haste to say in their Acadian French, "Ah! Master Toutou, you forget we went to school to our dear aunt. And besides, I am small and look young, but I am nearly a year older than Claude." She had wanted to be kind, but that was the first thorn. Older than he!

And not only that; nearly fifteen! Why, at fifteen—at fifteen girls get married! The odds were heavy. He wished he had thought of that at first. He was sadly confused. Sometimes when Bonaventure spoke words of enthusiasm and regard to him after urging him fiercely up some hill of difficulty among the bristling heights of English pronunciation, he yearned to seek him alone and tell him this difficulty of the heart. There was no fear that Bonaventure would laugh; he seemed scarce to know how; and his smiles were all of tenderness and zeal. Claude did not believe the ten years between them would matter; had not Bonaventure said to him but yesterday that to him all loveliness was the lovelier for being very young? Yet when the confession seemed almost on Claude's lips it was driven back by an alien mood in the master's face. There were troubles in Bonaventure's heart that Claude wot not of.

One day who should drop in just as school was about to begin but the priest from College Point! Such order as he found! Bonaventure stood at his desk like a general on a high hill, his large hand-bell in his grasp, passed his eyes over the seventeen demure girls, with their large, brown-black, liquid eyes, their delicately pencilled brows, their dark, waveless hair, and sounded one tap! The sport outside ceased, the gaps at the shed's farther end were darkened by small forms that came darting like rabbits into their burrows, eighteen small hats came off, and the eighteen boys came softly forward and took their seats. Such discipline!

"Sir," said Bonaventure, "think you 'tis arising, f'om the strickness of the teacher? 'Tis f'om the goodness of the chil'run! How I long the State Sup'inten'ent Public Education to see them!"

The priest commended the sight and the wish with smiling affirmations that somehow seemed to lack sympathy. He asked the names of two or three pupils. That little fellow with soft, tanned, chubby cheeks and great black eyes, tiny mouth, smooth feet so shapely and small, still wet to their ankles with dew, and arms that he could but just get folded, was Toutou. That lad with the strong shoulders, good wide brows, steady eye, and general air of manliness,—that was Claude St. Pierre. And this girl over on the left here,—"You observe," said Bonaventure, "I situate the lambs on the left and the kids on the right,"—this little, slender crescent of human moonlight, with her hair in two heavy, black, down-falling plaits, meek, drooping eyes, long lashes, soft childish cheeks and full throat, was Sidonie Le Blanc. Bonaventure murmured:—

"Best scholah in the school, yet the only—that loves not her teacher. But I give always my interest, not according to the interestingness, but rather to the necessitude, of each."

The visit was not long. Standing, about to depart, the visitor seemed still, as at the first, a man of many reservations under his polite smiles. But just then he dropped a phrase that the teacher recognized as an indirect quotation, and Bonaventure cried, with greedy eyes:—

"You have read Victor Hugo?"

"Yes."

"Oh, sir, that grea-a-at man! That father of libbutty! Other patriots are the sons, but he the father! Is it not thus?"

The priest shrugged and made a mouth. The young schoolmaster's face dropped.

"Sir, I must ask you—is he not the frien' of the poor and downtrod?"

The visitor's smile quite disappeared. He said:—

"Oh!"—and waved a hand impatiently; "Victor Hugo"—another mouth—"Victor Hugo"—replying in French to the schoolmaster's English—"is not of my party." And then he laughed unpleasantly and said good-day.

The State Superintendent did not come, but every day—"It is perhaps he shall come to-mo'w, chil'run; have yo' lessons well!"

The whole tiny army of long, blue, ankle-hiding cottonade pantalettes and pantaloons tried to fulfil the injunction. Not one but had a warm place in the teacher's heart. But Toutou, Claude, Sidonie, anybody who glanced into that heart could see sitting there enthroned. And some did that kind of reconnoitring. Catou, 'Mian's older brother, was much concerned. He saw no harm in a little education, but took no satisfaction in the introduction of English speech; and speaking to 'Mian of that reminded him to say he believed the schoolmaster himself was aware of the three children's pre-eminence in his heart. But 'Mian only said:—

"Ah bien, c'est all right, alors!" (Well, then, it's all right.) Whether all right or not, Bonaventure was aware of it, and tried to hide it under special kindnesses to others, and particularly to the dullard of the school, grandson of Catou and nicknamed Crebiche[4]. The child loved him; and when Claude rang the chapel bell, and before its last tap had thrilled dreamily on the morning air, when the urchins playing about the schoolhouse espied another group coming slowly across the common with Bonaventure in the midst of them, his coat on his arm and the children's hands in his, there among them came Crebiche, now on one side, now running round to the other, hoping so to get a little nearer to the master.

[4] Ecrevisse, crawfish.

"None shall have such kindness to-day as thou," Bonaventure would silently resolve as he went in through a gap in the pieux. And the children could not see but he treated them all alike. They saw no unjust inequality even when, Crebiche having three times spelt "earth" with an u, the master paced to and fro on the bare ground among the unmatched desks and break-back benches, running his hands through his hair and crying:—

"Well! well aht thou name' the crawfish; with such rapiditive celeritude dost thou progress backwardly!"

It must have been to this utterance that he alluded when at the close of that day he walked, as he supposed, with only birds and grasshoppers for companions, and they grew still, and the turtle-doves began to moan, and he smote his breast and cried:

"Ah! rules, rules! how easy to make, likewise break! Oh! the shame, the shame! If Victor Hugo had seen that! And if George Washington! But thou,"—some one else, not mentioned,—"thou sawedst it!"

The last word was still on the speaker's lips, when—there beside the path, with heavy eye and drunken frown, stood the father of Crebiche, the son of Catou, the little boy of twenty-five known as Chat-oue. He spoke:

"To who is dat you speak? Talk wid de dev'?"

Bonaventure murmured a salutation, touched his hat, and passed. Chat-oue moved a little, and delivered a broadside:

"Afteh dat, you betteh leave! Yes, you betteh leave Gran' Point'!"

"Sir," said Bonaventure, turning with flushed face, "I stay."

"Yes," said the other, "dass righ'; you betteh go way and stay. Magicien," he added as the schoolmaster moved on, "sorcier!—Voudou!—jackass!"

What did all this mean?



CHAPTER VI.

WAR OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT.

Catou, it seems, had gone one day to College Point with a pair of wild ducks that he had shot,—first of the season,—and offered them to the priest who preached for Grande Pointe once a quarter.

"Catou," said the recipient, in good French but with a cruel hardness of tone, "why does that man out there teach his school in English?" The questioner's intentions were not unkind. He felt a protector's care for his Acadian sheep, whose wants he fancied he, if not he only, understood. He believed a sudden overdose of enlightenment would be to them a real disaster, and he proposed to save them from it by the kind of management they had been accustomed to—they and their fathers—for a thousand years.

Catou answered the question only by a timid smile and shrug. The questioner spoke again:

"Why do you Grande Pointe folk allow it? Do you want your children stuffed full of American ideas? What is in those books they are studying? You don't know? Neither do I. I would not look into one of them. But you ought to know that to learn English is to learn free-thinking. Do you know who print those books that your children are rubbing their noses in? Yankees! Oh, I doubt not they have been sharp enough to sprinkle a little of the stuff they call religion here and there in them; 'tis but the bait on the hook! But you silly 'Cadians think your children are getting education, and that makes up for every thing else. Do you know what comes of it? Discontent. Vanity. Contempt of honest labor. Your children are going to be discontented with their lot. It will soon be good-by to sunbonnets; good-by to homespun; good-by to Grande Pointe,—yes, and good-by to the faith of your fathers. Catou, what do you know about that man, anyhow? You ask him no questions, you 'Cadians, and he—oh, he is too modest to tell you who or what he is. Who pays him?"

"He say pay is way behine. He say he don't get not'in' since he come yondeh," said Catou, the distress that had gathered on his face disappearing for a moment.

The questioner laughed contemptuously.

"Do you suppose he works that way for nothing? How do you know, at all, that his real errand is to teach school? A letter from Mr. Wallis! who simply told your simple-minded brother what the fellow told him! See here, Catou; you owe a tax as a raiser of tobacco, eh? And besides that, hasn't every one of you an absurd little sign stuck up on the side of his house, as required by the Government, to show that you owe another tax as a tobacco manufacturer? But still you have a little arrangement to neutralize that, eh? How do you know this man is not among you to look into that? Do you know that he can teach? No wonder he prefers to teach in English! I had a conversation with him the other day; I want no more; he preferred to talk to me in English. That is the good manners he is teaching; light-headed, hero-worshipping, free-thinker that he is."

Catou was sore dismayed. He had never heard of hero-worship or free-thinking before, but did not doubt their atrocity. It had never occurred to him that a man with a few spelling-books and elementary readers could be so dangerous to society.

"I wish he clear out from yondeh," said Catou. He really made his short responses in French, but in a French best indicated in bad English.

"Not for my sake," replied the priest, coldly smiling. "I shall just preach somewhere else on the thirteenth Sunday of each quarter, and let Grande Pointe go to the devil; for there is where your new friend is sure to land you. Good-day, I am very busy this morning."

These harsh words—harsh barking of the shepherd dog—spread an unseen consternation in Grande Pointe. Maximian was not greatly concerned. When he heard of the threat to cut off the spiritual table-crumbs with which the villagers had so scantily been fed, he only responded that in his opinion the dominie was no such a fool as that. But others could not so easily dismiss their fears. They began to say privately, leaning on fences and lingering at stiles, that they had felt from the very day of that first mad bell-ringing that the whole movement was too headlong; that this opening the sluices of English education would make trouble. Children shouldn't be taught what their parents do not understand. Not that there was special harm in a little spelling, adding, or subtracting, but—the notions they and the teacher produced! Here was the school's influence going through all the place like the waters of a rising tide. All Grande Pointe was lifting from the sands, and in danger of getting afloat and drifting toward the current of the great world's life. Personally, too, the schoolmaster seemed harmless enough. From the children and he loving each other, the hearts of the seniors had become entangled. The children had come home from the atmosphere of that old tobacco-shed, and persuaded the very grandmothers to understand vaguely—very vaguely and dimly—that the day of liberty which had come to the world at large a hundred years before had come at last to them; that in France their race had been peasants; in Acadia, forsaken colonists; in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, exiles alien to the land, the language, and the times; in St. Domingo, penniless, sick, unwelcome refugees; and for just one century in Louisiana the jest of the proud Creole, held down by the triple fetter of illiteracy, poverty, and the competition of unpaid, half-clad, swarming slaves. But that now the slave was free, the school was free, and a new, wide, golden future waited only on their education in the greatest language of the world.

All this was pleasant enough to accept even in a dim way, though too good to be more than remotely grasped. But just when, as music in a sleeper's ear, it is taking hold of their impulses somewhat, comes the word of their hereditary dictator that this man is among them only for their destruction. What could they reply? They were a people around whom the entire world's thought had swirled and tumbled for four hundred years without once touching them. Their ancestors had left France before Descartes or Newton had begun to teach the modern world to think. They knew no method of reasoning save by precedent, and had never caught the faintest reflection from the mind of that great, sweet thinker who said, "A stubborn retention of customs is a turbulent thing, no less than the introduction of new." To such strangers in the world of to-day now came the contemptuous challenge of authority, defying them to prove that one who proposed to launch them forth upon a sea of changes out of sight of all precedent and tradition was not the hireling of some enemy's gold secretly paid to sap the foundations of all their spiritual and temporal interests and plunge them into chaos.

They blamed Bonaventure; he had got himself hated and them rebuked; it was enough. They said little to each other and nothing to him; but they felt the sleepy sense of injury we all know so well against one who was disturbing their slumber; and some began to suspect and distrust him, others to think hard of him for being suspected and distrusted. Yet all this reached not his ears, and the first betrayal of it was from the lips of Chat-oue, when, in his cups, he unexpectedly invited the schoolmaster to leave Grande Pointe.

After that, even the unconscious schoolmaster could feel the faint chill of estrangement. But he laid it not to his work, but to his personal unloveliness, and said to 'Mian he did not doubt if he were more engaging there would not be so many maidens kept at the wheel and loom in the priceless hours of school, or so many strapping youths sent, all unlettered, to the sugar-kettles of the coast plantations what time M'sieu' Walleece big-in to gryne.

"'Tain't dat," said 'Mian. He had intended to tell the true reason, but his heart failed him; and when Bonaventure asked what, then, it was, he replied:

"Aw, dey don't got no time. Time run so fas',—run like a scared dog. I dunno fo' w'at dey make dat time run so fas' dat way."

"O my friend," cried the young schoolmaster, leaping from his chair, "say not that! If God did not make time to p'oceed with rapidness, who would ever do his best?"

It was such lessons as this that made the children—Crebiche among them—still gather round the humble master and love to grasp his hand.



CHAPTER VII.

LOVE AND DUTY.

Time ran fast. The seasons were as inexorable at Grande Pointe as elsewhere. But there was no fierceness in them. The very frosts were gentle. Slowly and kindly they stripped the green robes from many a tree, from many a thicket ejected like defaulting tenants the blue linnet, the orchard oriole, the nonpareil, took down all its leafy hangings and left it open to the winds and rain of December. The wet ponies and kine turned away from the north and stood in the slanting storm with bowed heads. The great wall of cypress swamp grew spectral. But its depths, the marshes far beyond sight behind them, and the little, hidden, rushy lakes, were alive with game. No snake crossed the path. Under the roof, on the galerie, the wheel hummed, the loom pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the board were venison, mallard, teal, rice-birds, sirop de baterie, and quitte; round the fireside were pipes, pecans, old stories, and the Saturday-night contra-dance; and every now and then came sounding on the outer air the long, hoarse bellow of some Mississippi steamer, telling of the great world beyond the tree-tops, a little farther than the clouds and nearer than the stars.

Christmas passed, and New Year—time runs so fast! Presently yonder was 'Mian himself, spading a piece of ground to sow his tobacco-seed in; then Catou and his little boy of twenty-five doing likewise; and then others all about the scattered village. Then there was a general spreading of dry brush over the spaded ground, then the sweet, clean smell of its burning, and, hanging everywhere throughout the clearing, its thin blue smoke. The little frogs began to pipe to each other again in every wet place, the grass began to freshen, and almost in the calendar's midwinter the smiles of spring were wreathing everywhere.

What of the schoolmaster and the children? Much, much! The good work went on. Intense days for Bonaventure. The clouds of disfavor darkling in some places, but brightening in others, and, on the whole, he hoped and believed, breaking. A few days of vacation, and then a bright re-union and resumption, the children all his faithful adherents save one—Sidonie. She, a close student, too, but growingly distant and reticent. The State Superintendent still believed to be—

"Impending, impending, chil'run! he is impending! Any day he may precipitate upon us!"

Intense days, too, for Claude. Sidonie openly, and oh, so sweetly, his friend. Loving him? He could neither say nor know; enough, for the present, to be allowed to love her. His love knew no spirit of conquest yet; it was star-worship; it was angel adoration; seraphically pure; something so celestially refined that had it been a tangible object you could have held it up and seen the stars right through it. The thought of acquisition would have seemed like coveting the gold of a temple. And yet already the faintest hint of loss was intolerable. Oh! this happy, happy school-going,—this faring sumptuously on one smile a day! Ah, if it might but continue! But alas! how Sidonie was growing! Growing, growing daily! up, up, up! While he—there was a tree in the swamp where he measured his stature every day; but in vain, in vain! It never budged! And then—all at once—like the rose-vine on her galerie, Sidonie burst into bloom.

Her smiles were kinder and more frequent now than ever before; but the boy's heart was wrung. What chance now? In four long years to come he would not yet be quite nineteen, and she was fifteen now. Four years! He was in no hurry himself—could wait forever and be happy every day of it; but she? Such prize as she, somebody would certainly bear away before three years could run by, run they ever so fast.

Sitting and pondering one evening in the little bayou cabin, Claude caught the father's eye upon him, leaned his forehead upon the parent's knee, and silently wept. The rough woodman said a kind word, and the boy, without lifting his burning face, told his love. The father made no reply for a long time, and then he said in their quaint old French:

"Claude, tell the young schoolmaster. Of all men, he is the one to help you." And then in English, as you would quote Latin, "Knowledge is power!"

The next day he missed—failed miserably—in every lesson. At its close he sat at his desk, crushed. Bonaventure seemed scarce less tempest-tossed than he; and all about the school the distress spread as wintry gray overcasts a sky. Only Sidonie moved calmly her accustomed round, like some fair, silent, wide-winged bird circling about a wreck.

At length the lad and his teacher were left alone. Claude sat very still, looking at his toil-worn hands lying crossed on the desk. Presently there sank an arm across his shoulders. It was the master's. Drop—drop—two big tears fell upon the rude desk's sleeve-polished wood. The small, hard, right hand slowly left its fellow, and rubbed off the wet spots.

"Claude, you have something to disclose me?"

The drooping head nodded.

"And 'tis not something done wrongly?"

The lad shook his head.

"Then, my poor Claude,"—the teacher's own voice faltered for a moment,—"then—'tis—'tis she!" He stroked the weeping head that sank into its hands. "Ah! yes, Claude, yes; 'tis she; 'tis she! And you want me to help you. Alas! in vain you want me! I cannot even try-y-y to help you; you have mentioned it too lately! 'Tis right you come to me, despiting discrepancy of years; but alas! the difficulty lies in the contrary; for alas! Claude, our two heart' are of the one, same age!"

They went out; and walking side by side toward the failing sun, with the humble flowers of the field and path newly opened and craving leave to live about their feet and knees, Bonaventure Deschamps revealed his own childlike heart to the simple boy whose hand clasped his.

"Yes, yes; I conceal not from you, Claude, that 'tis not alone 'thou lovest,' but 'I love'! If with cause to hope, Claude, I know not. And I must not search to know whilst yet the schoolmaster. And the same to you, Claude, whilst yet a scholah. We mus' let the dissimulation like a worm in the bud to h-eat our cheek. 'Tis the voice of honor cry—'Silence.' And during the meanwhilst, you? Perchance at the last, the years passing and you enlarging in size daily and arriving to budding manhood, may be the successful; for suspect not I consider lightly the youngness of yo' passion. Attend what I shall reveal you. Claude, there once was a boy, yo' size, yo' age, but fierce, selfish, distemperate; still more selfish than yo' schoolmaster of to-day." And there that master went on to tell of an early—like Claude's, an all too early—rash, and boyish passion, whose ragged wound, that he had thought never could heal, was now only a tender scar.

"And you, too, Claude, though now it seem not possible—you shall recuperate from this. But why say I thus? Think you I would inoculate the idea that you must despair? Nay, perchance you shall achieve her." They stood near the lad's pirogue about to say adieu; the schoolmaster waved his hand backward toward the farther end of the village. "She is there; in a short time she will cease to continue scholah; then—try." And again, with still more courageous kindness, he repeated, "Try! 'Tis a lesson that thou shouldest heed—try, try again. If at the first thou doest not succeed, try, try again."

Claude gazed gratefully into the master's face. Boy that he was, he did not read aright the anguish gathering there. From his own face the clouds melted into a glad sunshine of courage, resolve, and anticipation. Bonaventure saw the spark of hope that he had dropped into the boy's heart blaze up into his face. And what did Claude see? The hot blood mounting to the master's brow an instant ere he wheeled and hurried away.

"'Sieur Bonaventure!" exclaimed Claude; "'Sieur Bonaventure!"

But deaf to all tones alike, Bonaventure moved straight away along the bushy path, and was presently gone from sight. There is a repentance of good deeds. Bonaventure Deschamps felt it gnawing and tearing hard and harder within his bosom as he strode on through the wild vernal growth that closed in the view on every side. Soon he halted; then turned, and began to retrace his steps.

"Claude!" The tone was angry and imperative. No answer came. He quickened his gait. "Claude!" The voice was petulant and imperious. A turn of the path brought again to view the spot where the two had so lately parted. No one was there. He moaned and then cried aloud, "O thou fool, fool, fool!—Claude!" He ran; faster—faster—down the path, away from all paths, down the little bayou's margin, into the bushes, into the mud and water. "Claude! Claude! I told you wrongly! Stop! Arretez-la! I must add somewhat!—Claude!" The bushes snatched away his hat; tore his garments; bled him in hands and face; yet on he went into the edge of the forest. "Claude! Ah! Claude, thou hast ruin' me! Stop, you young rascal!—thief!—robber!—brigand!" A vine caught and held him fast. "Claude! Claude!"—The echoes multiplied the sound, and scared from their dead-tree roost a flock of vultures. The dense wood was wrapping the little bayou in its premature twilight. The retreating sun, that for a while had shot its flaming arrows through the black boles and branches, had sunk now and was gone. Only a parting ruby glow shone through the tangle where far and wide the echoes were calling for Claude.

"Claude! I mistook the facts in the case. There is no hope for you! 'Tis futile you try—the poem is not for you! I take every thing back!—all back! You shall not once try! You have grasp' the advantage! You got no business, you little rascal! You dare venture to attempt making love in my school! Claude St. Pierre, you are dismiss' the school! Mutiny! mutiny! Claude St. Pierre, for mutinizing, excluded the Gran' Point' school."

He tore himself from his fastenings and hastened back toward the village. The tempest within him was as fierce as ever; but already it, too, had turned and was coming out of the opposite quarter. The better Bonaventure—the Bonaventure purified by fires that Grande Pointe had no knowledge of—was coming back into his gentle self-mastery. And because that other, that old-time Bonaventure, bound in chains deep down within, felt already the triumph of a moment slipping from his grasp, he silently now to the outer air, but loudly within, railed and gnashed and tore himself the more.

He regained the path and hurried along it, hatless, dishevelled, bespattered, and oblivious to every thing save the war within. Presently there came upon him the knowledge, the certain knowledge, that Claude would come the next morning and ring the chapel bell, take his seat in school, stand in all his classes, know every lesson, and go home in the evening happy and all unchallenged of him. He groaned aloud.

"Ah! Claude! To dismiss or not to dismiss, it shall not be mine! But it shall be thine, Sidonie! And whether she is for thee, Claude—so juvenile!—or for me, so unfit, unfit, unfit!—Ah! Sidonie, choose not yet!"—He stood rooted to the spot; while within easy earshot of his lightest word tripped brightly and swiftly across the path from the direction of the chapel a fawn, Claude's gift, and its mistress, Sidonie—as though she neither saw nor heard.



CHAPTER VIII.

AT CLAUDE'S MERCY.

Time flagged not. The school shone on, within its walls making glad the teacher and the pupils with ever new achievements in knowledge and excellence. Some of the vanguard—Claude, Sidonie, Etienne, Madelaine, Henri, Marcelline—actually going into the Third Reader. Such perfection in lessons as they told about at home—such mastery of English, such satisfactory results in pronunciation and emphasis! Reading just as they talked? Oh, no, a thousand times no! The school's remoter light, its secondary influences, slowly spreading, but so slowly that only the eyes of enmity could see its increase. There were murmurs and head-shakings; but the thirteenth Sunday of the year's first quarter came, and the sermon whose withholding had been threatened was preached. And on the thirteenth Monday there was Bonaventure, still moving quietly across the green toward the schoolhouse with the children all about him. But a few days later the unexpected happened.

By this time Claude's father, whose teacher, you remember, was Claude, had learned to read. One day a surveyor, who had employed him as a guide, seeing the Acadian laboring over a fragment of rural newspaper, fell into conversation with him as they sat smoking by their camp-fire, and presently caught some hint of St. Pierre's aspirations for himself and his son.

"So there's a public school at Grande Pointe, is there?"

"Oh, yass; fine school; hondred feet long! and fine titcher; splendid titcher; titch English."

"Well, well!" laughed the surveyor. "Well, the next thing will be a railroad."

St. Pierre's eyes lighted up.

"You t'ink!"

"Why, yes; you can't keep railroads away from a place long, once you let in the public school and teach English."

"You t'ink dass good?"

"What, a railroad? Most certainly. It brings immigration."

"Whass dat—'migrash'n?"

The surveyor explained.

The next time St. Pierre came to Grande Pointe—to sell some fish—he came armed with two great words for the final overthrow of all opponents of enlightenment: "Rellroad!—'Migrash'n!"

They had a profound and immediate effect—exactly the opposite of what he had expected.

The school had just been dismissed; the children were still in sight, dispersing this way and that. Sidonie lingered a moment at her desk, putting it in order; Claude, taking all the time he could, was getting his canoe-paddle from a corner; Crebiche was waiting, by the master's command, to repair some default of the day; and Toutou, outside on his knees in the grass catching grasshoppers, was tarrying for his sister; when four or five of the village's best men came slowly and hesitatingly in. It required no power of divination for even the pre-occupied schoolmaster to guess the nature of their errand. 'Mian was not among them. Catou was at their head. They silently bowed. The schoolmaster as silently responded. The visitors huddled together. They came a step nearer.

"Well," said Catou, "we come to see you."

"Sirs, welcome to Gran' Point' school.—Sidonie, Crebiche, Claude, rest in yo' seats."

"Mo' betteh you tu'n 'em loose, I t'ink," said Catou amiably; "ain't it?"

"I rather they stay," replied Bonaventure. All sat down. There was a sustained silence, and then Catou said with quiet abruptness:

"We dawn't want no mo' school!"

"From what cause?"

"'Tain't no use."

"Sir—sirs, no use? 'Tis every use! The schoolhouse? 'tis mo' worth than the gole mine. Ah! sirs, tell me: what is gole without education?"

They confronted the riddle for a moment.

"Ed'cation want to change every thin'—rellroad—'migrash'n."

"Change every thing? Yes!—making every thing better! Sirs, where is that country that the people are sorry that the railroad and the schoolhouse have come?" Again the riddle went unanswered; but Catou sat as if in meditation, looking to one side, and presently said:

"I t'ink dass all humbug, dat titchin' English. What want titch English faw?"

"Sir," cried Bonaventure, "in America you mus' be American! Three Acadians have been governor of Louisiana! What made them thus to become?" He leaned forward and smote his hands together. "What was it? 'Twas English education!"

The men were silent again. Catou pushed his feet out, and looked at his shoes, put on for the occasion. Presently—

"Yass," he said, in an unconvinced tone; "yass, dass all right: but how we know you titch English? Nobody can't tell you titchin' him right or no."

"And yet—I do! And the time approach when you shall know! Sirs, I make to you a p'oposition. Time is passing. It must be soon the State Sup'inten'ent Public Education visit this school. The school is any time ready. Since long time are we waiting. He shall come—he shall examine! The chil'run shall be ignorant this arrangement! Only these shall know—Claude, Sidonie, Crebiche; they will not disclose! And the total chil'run shall exhibit all their previous learning! And welcome the day, when the adversaries of education shall see those dear chil'run stan' up befo' the assem'led Gran' Point' spelling co'ectly words of one to eight syllable' and reading from their readers! And if one miss—if one—one! miss, then let the school be shut and the schoolmaster banish-ed!"

It was so agreed. The debate did not cease at once, but it languished. Catou thought he had made one strong point when he objected to education as conducive to idle habits; but when the schoolmaster hurled back the fact that communities the world over are industrious just in proportion as they are educated, he was done. He did not know, but when he confronted the assertion it looked so true that he could not doubt it. He only said:

"Well, anyhow, I t'ink 'tain't no use Crebiche go school no mo'." But when Bonaventure pleaded for the lad's continuance, that too was agreed upon. The men departed.

"Crebiche," said the master, holding the boy's hand at parting, "ah! Crebiche, if thou become not a good scholar"—and read a promise in the boy's swimming eyes.

"Claude, Claude, I am at yo' mercy now." But the honest gaze of Claude and the pressure of his small strong hand were a pledge. The grateful master turned to Sidonie, and again, as of old, no Sidonie was there.



CHAPTER IX.

READY.

Summer came. The song-birds were all back again, waking at dawn, and making the hoary cypress wood merry with their carollings to the wives and younglings in the nests. Busy times. Foraging on the helpless enemy—earth-worm, gnat, grub, grasshopper, weevil, sawyer, dragon-fly—from morning till night: watching for him; scratching for him; picking, pecking, boring for him; poising, swooping, darting for him; standing upside down and peering into chinks for him; and all for the luxury—not of knowledge, but of love and marriage. The mocking-bird had no rest whatever. Back and forth from dawn to dark, back and forth across and across Grande Pointe clearing, always one way empty and the other way with his beak full of marketing; and then sitting up on an average half the night—sometimes the whole of it—at his own concert. And with military duties too; patrolling the earth below, a large part of it, and all the upper air; driving off the weasel, the black snake, the hawk, the jay, the buzzard, the crow, and all that brigand crew—busy times! All nature in glad, gay earnest. Corn in blossom and rustling in the warm breeze; blackberries ripe; morning-glories under foot; the trumpet-flower flaring from its dense green vine high above on the naked, girdled tree; the cotton-plant blooming white, yellow, and red in the field beneath; honey a-making in the hives and hollow trees; butterflies and bees lingering in the fields at sunset; the moth venturing forth at the first sign of dew; and Sidonie—a wild-rose tree.

Mark you, this was in Grande Pointe. I have seen the wild flower taken from its cool haunt in the forest, and planted in the glare of a city garden. Alas! the plight of it, poor outshone, wilting, odorless thing! And then I have seen it again in the forest; and pleasanter than to fill the lap with roses and tulips of the conservatory's blood-royal it was to find it there, once more the simple queen of that green solitude.

So Sidonie. Acadian maidens are shy as herons. They always see you first. They see you first, silently rise, and are gone—from the galerie. They are more shy than violets. You would think they lived whole days with those dark, black-fringed eyes cast down; but—they see you first. The work about the house is well done where they are; there are apt to be flowers outside round about; while they themselves are as Paul desired to see the women in bishop Timothy's church, "adorned in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety."

Flowers sprang plentifully where Sidonie dwelt. Her best homespun gown was her own weaving; the old dog lying on the galerie always thumped the floor with his tail and sank his obsequious head as that robe passed; the fawn—that Claude had brought—would come trotting and press its head against it; all the small living things of the dooryard would follow it about; and if she stood by the calf-pen the calves would push each other for the nearest place, lay their cheeks upon the fence's top, and roll their eyes—as many a youth of Grande Pointe would have done if he might. Chat-oue,—I fear I have omitted to mention that the father of Crebiche, like the father of Claude, had lost his wife before he was of age,—Chat-oue looked often over that fence.

When matters take that shape a girl must quit school. And yet Sidonie, when after a short vacation the school resumed its sessions, resumed with it. Toutou, who had to admit now that his sister was even more grand for her age than he, was always available for protection. There was no wonder that Sidonie wished to continue; Bonaventure explained why:

"So interesting is that McGuffey's Third Reader!"

Those at home hesitated, and presently it was the first of October. Now it was too late to withdraw; the examination was to take place. The school's opponents had expressed little impatience at the State Superintendent's weary delay, but at length Catou asked, "Why dat man don't nevva come!"

"The wherefore of his non-coming I ignore," said Bonaventure, with a look of old pain in his young face; "but I am ready, let him come or let him come not."

"'Tain't no use wait no longer," said Catou; "jis well have yo' lil show widout him."

"Sir, it shall be had! Revolution never go backwood!"

Much was the toil, many the anxieties, of the preparation. For Bonaventure at once determined to make the affair more than an examination. He set its date on the anniversary of the day when he had come to Grande Pointe. From such a day Sidonie could not be spared. She was to say a piece, a poem, an apostrophe to a star. A child, beholding the little star in the heavens, and wondering what it can be, sparkling diamond-like so high up above the world, exhorts it not to stop twinkling on his account. But to its tender regret the school knew that no more thereafter was Sidonie to twinkle in its firmament.

"Learn yo' lessons hard, chil'run; if the State Sup'inten'ent, even at the last, you know"—Bonaventure could not believe that this important outpost had been forgotten.



CHAPTER X.

CONSPIRACY.

About this time a certain Mr. Tarbox—G. W. Tarbox—was travelling on horseback and touching from house to house of the great sugar-estates of the river "coast," seeing the country and people, and allowing the elite to subscribe to the "Album of Universal Information."

One Sunday, resting at College Point, he was led by curiosity to cultivate the acquaintance of three men who had come in from Grande Pointe. One of them was Chat-oue. He could understand them, and make them understand him, well enough to play vingt et un with them the whole forenoon. He won all their money, drank with them, and took their five subscriptions, Chat-oue taking three—one for himself, one for Catou, and one for Crebiche. There was no delivery of goods there and then; they could not write; but they made their marks, and it was agreed that when Mr. Tarbox should come along a few days later to deliver the volumes, they were not to be received or paid for until with his scholarly aid the impostor who pretended to teach English education at Grande Pointe had been put to confusion and to flight.

"All right," said Tarbox; "all right. I'm the kind of State Superintendent you want. I like an adventure; and if there's any thing I just love, it's exposing a fraud! What day shall I come? Yes, I understand—middle of the day. I'll be on hand."

The fateful day came. In every house and on every galerie the morning tasks were early done. Then the best of every wardrobe was put on, the sun soared high, and by noon every chair in Grande Pointe was in the tobacco-shed where knowledge poured forth her beams, and was occupied by one or two persons. And then, at last, the chapel bell above Claude's head pealed out the final signal, and the schoolmaster moved across the green. Bonaventure Deschamps was weary. Had aught gone wrong? Far from it. But the work had been great, and it was now done. Every thing was at stake: the cause of enlightenment and the fortunes of his heart hung on the issue of the next few hours. Three pupils, one the oftenest rebuked of all the school, one his rival in love, one the queen of his heart, held his fate in their hands and knew it. With these thoughts mingled the pangs of an unconfessed passion and the loneliness of a benevolent nature famishing for a word of thanks. Yea, and to-day he must be his own judge.

His coat was on his arm, and the children round about him in their usual way as they came across the common; but his words, always so kind, were, on this day of all days, so dejected and so few that the little ones stole glances into his face and grew silent. Then, all at once, he saw,—yea, verily, he saw,—standing near the school entrance, a man from the great outer world!

He knew it by a hundred signs—the free attitude, the brilliant silk hat, the shaven face, and every inch of the attire. As plainly as one knows a green tree from a dead one, the Crusoe of Grande Pointe recognized one who came from the haunts of men; from some great nerve-centre of human knowledge and power where the human mind, trained and equipped, had piled up the spoils of its innumerable conquests. His whole form lighted up with a new life. His voice trembled with pent feeling as he said in deep undertone:

"Be callm, chil'run; be callm. Refrain excitement. Who you behole befo' you, yondeh, I ignore. But who shall we expect to see if not the State Sup'inten'ent Public Education? And if yea, then welcome, thrice welcome, the surprise! We shall not inquire him; but as a stranger we shall show him with how small reso'ce how large result." He put on his coat.

Mr. Tarbox had just reached the school-ground. His horse was fastened by the bridle to a picket in a fence behind him. A few boys had been out before the schoolhouse, and it was the sudden cessation of their clamor that had drawn Bonaventure's attention. Some of them were still visible, silently slipping through the gaps in the pieux and disappearing within. Bonaventure across the distance marked him beckon persuasively to one of them. The lad stopped, came forward, and gave his hand; and thereupon a second, a third, fourth, fifth, tenth, without waiting for invitation, emerged again and advanced to the same grave and silent ceremony. Two or three men who stood near did the same. The handshaking was just ending when Bonaventure and the stranger raised their hats to each other.

"Trust I don't intrude?"

"Sir, we are honored, not intruded, as you shall witness. Will you give yourself the pain to enter the school-place? I say not schoolhouse; 'tis, as its humble teacher, not fitly so nominated. But you shall therein find a school which, the more taken by surprise, not the less prepared."

"The State ought to build you a good schoolhouse," said the stranger, with a slight frown that seemed official.

"Ah! sir," cried the young schoolmaster, beaming gratitude from his whole surface, "I—I"—he smote his breast,—"I would reimburst her in good citizen' and mother' of good citizen'! And both reading, writing, and also ciphering,—arithmeticulating, in the English tongue, and grammatically! But enter and investigate."

A hush fell upon the school and the audience beyond it as the two men came in. Every scholar was in place—the little ones with bare, dangling feet, their shapely sun-tanned ankles just peeping from pantaloons and pantalettes of equal length; the older lads beyond them; and off at the left the larger girls, and Sidonie. The visitor, as his eye fell last upon her, silently and all to himself drew a long whistle of admiration. The master stood and eyed him with unspoken but confessed pride. A little maiden of six slipped from the bench to the earth floor, came forward, gave her hand, and noiselessly returned. One by one, with eyes dropped, the remaining sixteen girls followed. It seemed for a moment as if the contagion might break out in the audience, but the symptom passed.

There was just room on the teacher's little platform for Bonaventure to seat his visitor a little at one side and stand behind his desk. The fateful moment had come. The master stood nervously drawn up, bell in hand. With a quick, short motion he gave it one tap, and set it down.

"That, sir, is to designate attention!" He waved a triumphant hand toward the spectacle before them.

"Perfect!" murmured the stranger. A look of earnest ecstasy broke out upon the master's face. He turned at first upon the audience and then upon the school.

"Chil'run, chil'run, he p'onounce you perfect!" He turned again upon the visitor, threw high his right hand, flirted it violently, and cried:—