"At random! exclusively at random; state what class! at random!"

"I—I doubt if I under"—

"Name any class, exclusively at random, and you shall see with what promptness and quietude the chil'run shall take each one their exactly co'ect places."

"Oh, I understand. You want me to designate"—

"Any class! at yo' caprice."

"Well, if you have—third class in geography."

"Or spelling?" cried Bonaventure, a momentary look of dismay giving place to fresh enthusiasm.

"Yes—spell—I meant spelling."

"Third spelling!" The tongue of the bell fell with the emphasis, and as silently as sleep the tiniest seven in the school, four pairs of pantaloons, three of pantalettes, with seven of little bare feet at their borders and seven of hands pointed down stiffly at their sides, came out and stood a-row. The master turned to the visitor.

"Now, commencing wherever, even at the foot if desired! ask, sir, if you please, any English word of one syllable, of however difficult!"

"No matter how difficult?"

"Well, they are timid, as you see; advance by degrees."

"Very well, then," said the visitor with much kindness of tone; "I will ask the little boy at this end"—

"At the foot—but—still, 'tis well. Only—ah, Crebiche! every thing depend! Be prepared, Crebiche!"

"Yes," said the stranger; "I will ask him to spell hoss."

The child drew himself up rigidly, pointed his stiffened fingers down his thighs, rounded his pretty red mouth, and said slowly, in a low, melodious, distinct voice:—

"'O-double eth, awth."

Bonaventure leapt from the platform and ran to the child.

"Ah! mon p'tit garcon—ah! my lil boy! 'O-double eth, listten, my chile. O, sir, he did not hear the word precisely. Listten, my chile, to yo' teacher! remember that his honor and the school's honor is in yo' spelling!" He drew back a step, poised himself, and gave the word. It came like an anchor-chain crashing through a hawse-hole.

"Or-r-r-r-rus-seh!" And the child, winking at vacancy in the intensity of his attention, spelled:—

"Haich-o-r-eth-e, 'Orthe."

The breathless audience, leaning forward, read the visitor's commendation in his face. Bonaventure, beaming upon him, extended one arm, the other turned toward the child, and cried, shaking both hands tremulously:—

"Another! another word! another to the same!"

"Mouse," said the stranger, and Bonaventure turned and cried:—

"Mah-ooseh! my nob'e lil boy! Mah-ooseh!" and Crebiche, a speaking statue, spelled:—

"M-o-u-eth-e, mouthe."

"Co'ect, my chile! And yet, sir, and yet, 'tis he that they call Crebiche, because like the crawfish advancing backwardly. But to the next! another word! another word!"

The spelling, its excitements, its moments of agonizing suspense, and its triumphs, went on. The second class is up. It spells in two, even in three, syllables. Toutou is in it. He gets tremendously wrought up; cannot keep two feet on the ground at once; spells fast when the word is his; smiles in response to the visitor's smile, the only one who dares; leans out and looks down the line with a knuckle in his mouth as the spelling passes down; wrings one hand as his turn approaches again; catches his word in mid-air and tosses it off, and marks with ecstasy the triumph and pride written on the face of his master.

"But, sir," cries Bonaventure, "why consume the spelling-book? Give, yourself, if you please, to Toutou, a word not therein comprise'." He glanced around condescendingly upon the people of Grande Pointe. Chat-oue is in a front seat. Toutou gathers himself for the spring, and the stranger ponders a moment and then gives—"Florida!"

"F-l-o, flo, warr-de-warr-da,—Florida!"

A smile broke from the visitor's face unbidden, but—

"Right! my chile! co'ect, Toutou!" cried Bonaventure, running and patting the little hero on the back and head by turns. "Sir, let us"—He stopped short. The eyes of the house were on Chat-oue. He had risen to his feet and made a gesture for the visitor's attention. As the stranger looked at him he asked:—

"He spell dat las word r-i-i-ight?" But the visitor with quiet gravity said, "Yes, that was all right;" and a companion pulled the Raccoon down into his seat again. Bonaventure resumed.

"Sir, let us not exhoss the time with spelling! You shall now hear them read."

The bell taps, the class retires; again, and the reading class is up. They are the larger girls and boys. But before they begin the master has a word for their fathers and mothers.

"Friends and fellow-citizens of Gran' Point', think not at the suppi-zing goodness of yo' chil'run' reading. 'Tis to this branch has been given the largest attention and most assidu'ty, so thus to comprise puffection in the English tongue, whether speaking aw otherwise." He turned to the stranger beside him. "I am not satisfied whilst the slightest accent of French is remaining. But you shall judge if they read not as if in their own vernaculary. And you shall choose the piece!"

The visitor waived the privilege, but Bonaventure gently insisted, and he selected Jane Taylor's little poem, "The Violet," glancing across at Sidonie as he himself read out the first two lines:—

"Down in a green and shady bed A modest violet grew."

Bonaventure proclaimed the title and page and said:—

"Claude, p'oceed!" And Claude read:—

"'Dthee vy—ee-lit. Dah-oon-a hin hay grin and-a shad-y bade—A mo-dest-a vy-ee-lit grŏo—Hits-a stallk whoz baint hit hawngg-a hits hade—Has hif-a too hah-ed-a frawm ve-ŏo. Hand h-yet it whoz a lo-vly flow'r—Hits-a co-lors-a brah-eet and fair-a—Heet maheet-a hāve grass-ed a rozzy bow'r—Heenstade-a hof hah-ee-dingg there"—

"Stop!" cried Bonaventure; "stop! You pronounciate' a word faultily!" He turned to the visitor. "I call not that a miss; but we must inoculate the idea of puffection. So soon the sly-y-test misp'onounciating I pass to the next." He turned again: "Next!" And a black-haired girl began in a higher key, and very slowly:—

"Yate there eet whoz cawntaint-a too bulloom—Heen mo-dest-a teent z-arrayed—And there-a heet sprade-a heets swit pre-fume-a—Whit-hin thee sy-y-lent-a shade"—

"Stop! Not that you mistook, but—'tis enough. Sir, will you give yourself the pain to tell—not for my sake or reputation, but to the encouragement of the chil'run, and devoid flattery—what is yo' opinion of that specimen of reading? Not t'oubling you, but, in two or three word' only—if you will give yo'self the pain"—

"Why, certainly; I think it is—I can hardly find words—it's remarkable." Bonaventure started with joy.

"Chil'run, do you hear? Remawkable! But do you not detect no slight—no small faultiness of p'onounciating?"

"No, not the slightest; I smile, but I was thinking of something else." The visitor's eye, wandering a trifle, caught Chat-oue giving him one black look that removed his disposition to smile, yet he insisted, "No, sir; I can truthfully say I never heard such a pronunciation." The audience drank his words.

"Sir," cried the glad preceptor, "'tis toil have p'oduce it! Toil of the teacher, industry of the chil'run! But it has p'oduce' beside! Sir, look—that school! Since one year commencing the A B C—and now spelling word' of eight syllabl'!"

"Not this school?"

"Sir, you shall see—or, more p'operly, hear. First spelling!"

"Yes," said the stranger, seeing Sidonie rise, "I'd like to hear that class;" and felt Chat-oue looking at him again.



CHAPTER XI.

LIGHT, LOVE, AND VICTORY.

The bell tapped, and they came forth to battle. There was the line, there was the leader. The great juncture of the day was on him. Was not here the State's official eye? Did not victory hover overhead? His reserve, the darling regiment, the flower of his army, was dressing for the final charge. There was Claude. Next him, Sidonie!—and Etienne, and Madelaine, Henri and Marcelline,—all waiting for the word—the words—of eight syllables! Supreme moment! Would any betray? Banish the thought! Would any fail?

He waited an instant while two or three mothers bore out great armfuls of slumbering or fretting infancy and a number of young men sank down into the vacated chairs. Then he stepped down from the platform, drew back four or five yards from the class, opened the spelling-book, scanned the first word, closed the book with his finger at the place, lifted it high above his head, and cried:

"Claude! Claude, my brave scholar, always perfect, ah you ready?" He gave the little book a half whirl round, and dashed forward toward the chosen scholar, crying as he came:

"In-e-rad-i-ca-bility!"

Claude's face suddenly set in a stony vacancy, and with his eyes staring straight before him he responded:

"I-n, in-, e, inerad-, r-a-d, rad-, inerad-, ineraddy-, ineradica-, c-a, ca, ineradica-, ineradicabili-, b-i-elly-billy, ineradicabili-, ineradicabili-, t-y, ty, ineradicability."

"Right! Claude, my boy! my always good scholar, right!" The master drew back to his starting-place as he spoke, re-opened the book, shut it again, lifted it high in air, cried, "Madelaine, my dear chile, prepare!" whirled the book and rushed upon her with—

"In-de-fat-i-ga-bil-ly-ty!"

Madelaine turned to stone and began:

"I-n, een, d-e, de-, inde-, indefat-, indefat—fat—f-a-t, fat, indefat, indefatty, i, ty, indefati-, indefatiga-, g-a, ga, indefatiga-, indefatigabilly, b-i-elly, billy, indefatigabili-, t-y, ty, indefatigability."

"O, Madelaine, my chile, you make yo' teacher proud! prah-ood, my chile!" Bonaventure's hand rested a moment tenderly on her head as he looked first toward the audience and then toward the stranger. Then he drew off for the third word. He looked at it twice before he called it. Then—

"Sidonie! ah! Sidonie, be ready! be prepared! fail not yo' humble school-teacher! In-com"—He looked at the word a third time, and then swept down upon her:

"In-com-pre-hen-si-ca-bility!"

Sidonie flinched not nor looked upon him, as he hung over her with the spelling-book at arm's-reach above them; yet the pause that followed seemed to speak dismay, and throughout the class there was a silent recoil from something undiscovered by the master. But an instant later Sidonie had chosen between the two horns of her agonizing dilemma, and began:

"I-n, een, c-o-m, cawm, eencawm, eencawmpre, p-r-e, pre, eencawmpre, eencawmprehen, prehen, haich-e-n, hen, hen, eencawmprehensi, s-i, si, eencawmprehensi-, b-i-l"—

"Ah! Sidonie! Stop! Arretez! Si-do-nie-e-e-e! Oh! listen—ecoutez— Sidonie, my dear!" The master threw his arms up and down in distraction, then suddenly faced his visitor, "Sir, it was my blame! I spoke the word without adequate distinction! Sidonie—maintenant—now!" But a voice in the audience interrupted with—

"Assoiez-vous la, Chat-oue! Seet down yondeh!" And at the potent voice of Maximian Roussel the offender was pushed silently into the seat he had risen from, and Bonaventure gave the word again.

"In-com-pre-hen-si-ca-bil-i-ty!" And Sidonie, blushing like fire, returned to the task:

"I-n, een"—She bit her lip and trembled.

"Right! Right! Tremble not, my Sidonie! fear naught! yo' loving school-teacher is at thy side!" But she trembled like a red leaf as she spelled on—"Haich-e-n, hen, eencawmprehen, eencawmprehensi, s-i, si, eencawmprehensi-, eencawmprehensi-billy-t-y, ty, incomprehensibility!"

The master dropped his hands and lifted his eyes in speechless despair. As they fell again upon Sidonie, her own met them. She moaned, covered her face in her hands, burst into tears, ran to her desk and threw her hands and face upon it, shaking with noiseless sobs and burning red to the nape of her perfect neck. All Grande Pointe rose to its feet.

"Lost!" cried Bonaventure in a heart-broken voice. "Every thing lost! Farewell, chil'run!" He opened his arms toward them and with one dash all the lesser ones filled them. They wept. Tears welled from Bonaventure's eyes; and the mothers of Grande Pointe dropped again into their seats and silently added theirs.

The next moment all eyes were on Maximian. His strong figure was mounted on a chair, and he was making a gentle, commanding gesture with one hand as he called:

"Seet down! Seet down, all han'!" And all sank down, Bonaventure in a mass of weeping and clinging children. 'Mian too resumed his seat, at the same time waving to the stranger to speak.

"My friends," said the visitor, rising with alacrity, "I say when a man makes a bargain, he ought to stick to it!" He paused for them—as many as could—to take in the meaning of his English speech, and, it may be, expecting some demonstration of approval; but dead silence reigned, all eyes on him save Bonaventure's and Sidonie's. He began again:

"A bargain's a bargain!" And Chat-oue nodded approvingly and began to say audibly, "Yass;" but 'Mian thundered out:

"Taise toi, Chat-oue! Shot op!" And the silence was again complete, while the stranger resumed.

"There was a plain bargain made." He moved a step forward and laid the matter off on the palm of his hand. "There was to be an examination; the school was not to know; but if one scholar should make one mistake the schoolhouse was to be closed and the schoolmaster sent away. Well, there's been a mistake made, and I say a bargain's a bargain." Dead silence still. The speaker looked at 'Mian. "Do you think they understand me?"

"Dey meck out," said 'Mian, and shut his firm jaws.

"My friends," said the stranger once more, "some people think education's a big thing, and some think it ain't. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it ain't. Now, here's this man"—he pointed down to where Bonaventure's dishevelled crown was drooping to his knees—"claims to have taught over thirty of your children to read. Well, what of it? A man can know how to read, and be just as no account as he was before. He brags that he's taught them to talk English. Well, what does that prove? A man might speak English and starve to death. He claims, I am told, to have taught some of them to write. But I know a man in the penitentiary that can write; he wrote too much."

Bonaventure had lifted his head and was sitting with his eyes upon the speaker in close attention. At this last word he said:

"Ah! sir! too true, too true ah yo' words; nevertheless, their cooelty! 'Tis not what is print' in the books, but what you learn through the books!"

"Yes; and so you hadn't never ought to have made the bargain you made; but, my friends, a bargain's a bargain, and the teacher's"—He paused invitingly, and an answer came from the audience. It was Catou who rose and said:

"Naw, sah. Naw; he don't got to go!" But again 'Mian thundered:

"Taise toi, Catou. Shot op!"

"I say," continued the stranger, "the mistake's been made. Three mistakes have been made!"

"Yass!" roared Chat-oue, leaping to his feet and turning upon the assemblage a face fierce with triumph. Suspense and suspicions were past now; he was to see his desire on his enemy. But instantly a dozen men were on their feet—St. Pierre, Catou, Bonaventure himself, with a countenance full of pleading deprecation, and even Claude, flushed with anger.

"Naw, sah! Naw, sah! Waun meesteck?"

"Seet down, all han'!" yelled 'Mian; "all han' seet dah-oon!" Only Chat-oue took his seat, glancing upon the rest with the exultant look of one who can afford to yield ground.

"The first mistake," resumed the stranger, addressing himself especially to the risen men still standing, and pointedly to Catou, "the first mistake was in the kind of bargain you made." He ceased, and passed his eyes around from one to another until they rested an instant on the bewildered countenance of Chat-oue. Then he turned again upon the people, who had sat down, and began to speak with the exultation of a man that feels his subject lifting him above himself.

"I came out here to show up that man as a fraud. But what do I find? A poor, unpaid, half-starved man that loves his thankless work better than his life, teaching what not one schoolmaster in a thousand can teach; teaching his whole school four better things than were ever printed in any school-book,—how to study, how to think, how to value knowledge, and to love one another and mankind. What you'd ought to have done was to agree that such a school should keep open, and such a teacher should stay, if jest one, one lone child should answer one single book-question right! But as I said before, a bargain's a bargain—Hold on there! Sit down! You sha'n't interrupt me again!" Men were standing up on every side. There was confusion and a loud buzz of voices. "The second mistake," the stranger made haste to cry, "was thinking the teacher gave out that last word right. He gave it wrong! And the third mistake," he shouted against the rising commotion, "was thinking it was spelt wrong. She spelt it right! And a bargain's a bargain! The schoolmaster stays!"

He could say no more; the rumble of voices suddenly burst into a cheer. The women and children laughed and clapped their hands,—Toutou his feet also,—and Bonaventure, flirting the leaves of a spelling book till he found the place, looked, cried—"In-com-pre-hen-sibility!" wheeled and dashed upon Sidonie, seized her hands in his as she turned to fly, and gazed speechlessly upon her, with the tears running down his face. Feeling a large hand upon his shoulder, he glanced around and saw 'Mian pointing him to his platform and desk. Thither he went. The stranger had partly restored order. Every one was in his place. But what a change! What a gay flutter throughout the old shed! Bonaventure seemed to have bathed in the fountain of youth. Sidonie, once more the school's queen-flower, sat calm, with just a trace of tears adding a subtle something to her beauty.

"Chil'run, beloved chil'run," said Bonaventure, standing once more by his desk, "yo' school-teacher has the blame of the sole mistake; and, sir, gladly, oh, gladly, sir, would he always have the blame rather than any of his beloved school-chil'run! Sir, I will boldly ask you—ah you not the State Sup'inten'ent Public Education?"

"No, I"—

"But surely, sir, than a greater?—Yes, I discover it, though you smile. Chil'run—friends—not the State Sup'inten'ent, but greater!—Pardon; have yo' chair, sir."

"Why, the examination's over, isn't it? Guess you'd better call it finished, hadn't you?" He made the suggestion softly, but Bonaventure answered aloud:

"Figu'atively speaking, 'tis conclude'; but—pardon—you mention' writing. Shall you paht f'om us not known—not leaving yo' name—in a copy-book, for examp'?"

"With pleasure. You do teach writing?"

"If I teach writing? To such with desks, yes. 'Twould be to all but for the privation of desks. You perceive how we have here nothing less than a desk famine. Madelaine! Claude! Sidonie!—present copy-book'! Sir, do you not think every chile should be provided a desk?—Ah! I knew 'twould be yo' verdic'. But how great trouble I have with that subjec'! Me, I think yes; but the parents,"—he looked tenderly over among them,—"they contend no. Now, sir, here are three copy-books. Inspect; criticise. No, commence rather, if you please, with the copy-book of Madelaine; then p'oceed to the copy-book of Claude, and finally conclude at the copy-book of Sidonie; thus rising by degrees: good, more good, most good."

"How about," asked the stranger, with a smile, as he turned the leaves, "about Toutou and Crebiche; don't they write?"

"Ah! sir," said Bonaventure, half to the stranger and half to the assemblage, "they write, yes; but—they ah yet in the pot-hook and chicken-track stage. And now, chil'run, in honor of our eminent friend's visitation, and of the excellence with which you have been examine', I p'onounce the exhibition finish'—dispensing with 'Twink', twink' lil stah.' And now, in the book of the best writing scholar in the school—you, sir, deciding that intricacy—shall now be written the name of the eminent frien' of learning hereinbefo' confronting.—Claude! a new pen!"

The stranger made his choice among the books.

"Chil'run, he has select' the book of Sidonie!" Bonaventure reached and swung a chair into place at his desk. The visitor sat down. Bonaventure stood over him, gazing down at the hand that poised the pen. The silence was profound.

"Chil'run—sh-sh-sh!" said the master, lifting his left arm but not his eyes. The stranger wrote a single initial.

"G! chil'run; G!—Sir, does it not signify George?"

"Yes," murmured the writer; "it stands for George." He wrote another.

"W! my chil'run; George W!—Sir, does it not sig—My chil'run! George Washington! George Washington, my chil'run! George Washington, the father of his country! My chil'run and fellow-citizen' of Gran' Point', he is nominated for George Washington, the father of his country! Sir, ah you not a relation?"

"I really can't tell you," said the writer, with a calm smile. "I've always been too busy to look it up." He finished his signature as he talked. Bonaventure bent over it.

"Tar-box. Chil'run and friends and fellow-citizen', I have the p'oudness to int'oduce you the hono'able George Washington Tarbox! And now the exhibition is dismiss'; but stop! Sir, if some—aw all—desire gratefully to shake hand'?"

"I should feel honored."

"Attention, everybody! Make rank! Everybody by two by two, the school-chil'run coming last,—Claude and Sidonie resting till the end,—pass 'round—shake hand'—walk out—similah a fu-nial."

So came, shook hands, and passed out and to their simple homes, the manhood, motherhood, maidenhood, childhood of Grande Pointe, not knowing that before many days every household in the village was to be a subscriber to the "Album of Universal Information."

One of the last of the householders was Chat-oue. But when he grasped the honored hand, he also held it, fixing upon its owner a generous and somewhat bacchanalian smile.

"I'm a fool, but I know. You been put op a jawb on me. Dass four, five days now I been try to meck out what dat niggah at Belle Alliance holla to me when I gallop down de road." (Chat-oue's English had been acquired from negroes in the sugar-house, and was like theirs.) "He been braggin' dat day befo'"—turning to Bonaventure—"how 'twas him show you de road to Gran' Point' las' year; and so I git mad and tell him, me," addressing the stranger again, "how we goin' git school shot op. Well, dat night I mit him comin' fum Gran' Point' and he hol' at me. I been try evva since meck out what he say. Yass. An' I jis meck it out! He say, 'Watch out, watch out, 'Mian Roussel and dat book-fellah dawn't put op jawb on you.' Well, I'm a fool, but I know. You put op jawb on me; I know. But dass all right—I don't take no book." He laughed with the rest, scratched his tipsy head, and backed out through the pieux.

Only a fairy number remained, grouped around the honorable Tarbox. They were St. Pierre, Bonaventure,—Maximian detaining a middle-aged pair, Sidonie's timorous guardians,—and two others, who held back, still waiting to shake hands.

"Claude," cried Bonaventure; "Sidonie."

They came. Claude shook hands and stepped inside. Sidonie, with eyes on the ground, put forth her hand. The honored guest held it lingeringly, and the ceremonies were at an end.

"Come," said 'Mian, beckoning away the great G. W.'s probable relative. They passed out together. "Come!" he repeated, looking back and beckoning again; "walk een! all han'! walk een house!"

The guardian pair followed, hand in hand.

"Claude," said Bonaventure tenderly; but—

"Claude," more firmly said St. Pierre.

The boy looked for one instant from the master's face to Sidonie's; then turned, grasped his father's hand, and followed the others.

A blaze of light filled Bonaventure's heart. He turned to Sidonie to give his hand—both her hands were clasped upon each other, and they only tightened. But their eyes met—ah! those Acadian maidens, they do it all with their eyes!—and lover and maiden passed out and walked forth side by side. They are going that way still, only—with hands joined.



AU LARGE.



CHAPTER I.

THE POT-HUNTER.

The sun was just rising, as a man stepped from his slender dug-out and drew half its length out upon the oozy bank of a pretty bayou. Before him, as he turned away from the water, a small gray railway-platform and frame station-house, drowsing on long legs in the mud and water, were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp, whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest two or three of a few flimsy wooden houses and a saw-mill with its lumber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and idle engine.

As with gun and game this man mounted by a short, rude ladder to firmer footing on the platform, a negro, who sat fishing for his breakfast on the bank a few yards up the stream, where it bent from the north and west, slowly lifted his eyes, noted that the other was a white man, an Acadian, and brought his gaze back again to hook and line.

He had made out these facts by the man's shape and dress, for the face was in shade. The day, I say, was still in its genesis. The waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily, nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the "shaking prairie,"[5] two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet dusky and pink, sparkled on their sunward edges like a frosted fleece. You could not have told whether the Acadian saw the black man or not. His dog, soiled and wet, stood beside his knee, pricked his ears for a moment at sight of the negro, and then dropped them.

[5] The "shaking prairie," "trembling prairie," or prairie tremblante, is low, level, treeless delta land, having a top soil of vegetable mould overlying immense beds of quicksand.

It was September. The comfortable air could only near by be seen to stir the tops of the high reeds whose crowding myriads stretched away south, west, and north, an open sea of green, its immense distances relieved here and there by strips of swamp forest tinged with their peculiar purple haze. Eastward the railroad's long causeway and telegraph-poles narrowed on the view through its wide axe-hewn lane in the overtowering swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more away, was in that direction. Westward, rails, causeway, and telegraph, tapered away again across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the "trembling prairie" till the green disguise of reeds and rushes closed in upon the attenuated line, and only a small notch in a far strip of woods showed where it still led on toward Texas. Behind the Acadian the smoke of woman's early industry began to curl from two or three low chimneys.

But his eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his feet beside a bunch of egrets,—killed for their plumage,—the butt of his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand, toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race. His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish and shapely. His garments were coarse, but there were no tatters anywhere. He wore a wide Campeachy hat. His brown hair was too long, but it was fine. His eyes, too, were brown, and, between brief moments of alertness, sedate. Sun and wind had darkened his face, and his pale brown beard curled meagre and untrimmed on a cheek and chin that in forty years had never felt a razor.

Some miles away in the direction in which he was looking, the broadening sunlight had struck and brightened the single red lug-sail of a boat whose unseen hull, for all the eye could see, was coming across the green land on a dry keel. But the bayou, hidden in the tall rushes, was its highway; for suddenly the canvas was black as it turned its shady side, and soon was red again as another change of direction caught the sunbeams upon its tense width and showed that, with much more wind out there than it would find by and by in here under the lee of the swamp, it was following the unseen meanderings of the stream. Presently it reached a more open space where a stretch of the water lay shining in the distant view. Here the boat itself came into sight, showed its bunch of some half-dozen passengers for a minute or two, and vanished again, leaving only its slanting red sail skimming nautilus-like over the vast breezy expanse.

Yet more than two hours later the boat's one blue-shirted, barefoot Sicilian sailor in red worsted cap had with one oar at the stern just turned her drifting form into the glassy calm by the railway-station, tossed her anchor ashore, and was still busy with small matters of boat-keeping, while his five passengers clambered to the platform.

The place showed somewhat more movement now. The negro had long ago wound his line upon its crooked pole, gathered up his stiffened fishes from the bank, thrust them into the pockets of his shamelessly ragged trousers, and was gone to his hut in the underbrush. But the few amphibious households round about were passing out and in at the half-idle tasks of their slow daily life, and a young white man was bustling around, now into the station and now out again upon the platform, with authority in his frown and a pencil and two matches behind his ear. It was Monday. Two or three shabby negroes with broad, collapsed, glazed leather travelling-bags of the old carpet-sack pattern dragged their formless feet about, waiting to take the train for the next station to hire out there as rice harvesters, and one, with his back turned, leaned motionless against an open window gazing in upon the ticking telegraph instruments. A black woman in blue cotton gown, red-and-yellow Madras turban, and some sportsman's cast-off hunting-shoes minus the shoe-strings, crouched against the wall. Beside her stood her shapely mulatto daughter, with head-covering of white cotton cloth, in which female instinct had discovered the lines of grace and disposed them after the folds of the Egyptian fellah head—dress. A portly white man, with decided polish in his commanding air, evidently a sugar-planter from the Mississippi "coast" ten miles northward, moved about in spurred boots, and put personal questions to the negroes, calling them "boys," and the mulattress, "girl."

The pot-hunter was still among them; or rather, he had drawn apart from the rest, and stood at the platform's far end, leaning on his gun, an innocent, wild-animal look in his restless eyes, and a slumberous agility revealed in his strong, supple loins. The station-agent went to him, and with abrupt questions and assertions, to which the man replied in low, grave monosyllables, bought his game,—as he might have done two hours before, but—an Acadian can wait. There was some trouble to make exact change, and the agent, saying "Hold on, I'll fix it," went into the station just as the group from the Sicilian's boat reached the platform. The agent came bustling out again with his eyes on his palm, counting small silver.

"Here!" But he spoke to the empty air. He glanced about with an offended frown.

"Achille!" There was no reply. He turned to one of the negroes: "Where's that 'Cajun?" Nobody knew. Down where his canoe had lain, tiny rillets of muddy water were still running into its imprint left in the mire; but canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the rank undergrowth of the swamp.



CHAPTER II.

CLAUDE.

Of the party that had come in the Sicilian's boat four were men and one a young woman. She was pretty; so pretty, and of such restful sweetness of countenance, that the homespun garb, the brand-new creaking gaiters, and a hat that I dare not describe were nothing against her. Her large, soft, dark eyes, more sweetly but not less plainly than the attire, confessed her a denizen of the woods.

Not so the man who seemed to be her husband. His dress was rustic enough; and yet you would have seen at once that it was not the outward circumstance, but an inward singularity, that had made him and must always keep him a stranger to the ordinary ways of men. There was an emotional exaltation in his face as he hastily led his companions with military directness to the ticket window. Two others of the men were evidently father and son, the son barely twenty years of age, the parent certainly not twice as old; and the last of the group was a strong, sluggish man of years somewhat near, but under, fifty.

They bought but one ticket; but, as one may say, they all bought it, the youngest extricating its price with difficulty from the knotted corner of his red handkerchief, and the long, thin hand of the leader making the purchase, while the eyes of the others followed every movement with unconscious absorption.

The same unemotional attentiveness was in their forms as their slow feet drifted here and there always after the one leader, their eyes on his demonstrative hands, and their ears drinking in his discourse. He showed them the rails of the track, how smooth they were, how they rested on their cross-ties, and how they were spiked in place always the same width apart. They crowded close about him at the telegraph-window while he interpreted with unconscious originality the wonders of electricity. Their eyes rose slowly from the window up and out along the ascending wires to where they mounted the poles and eastward and westward leaped away sinking and rising from insulator to insulator. One of the party pointed at these green dots of glass and murmured a question, and the leader's wife laid her small hand softly upon his arm to check the energy of his utterance as he said, audibly to all on the platform, and with a strong French accent:

"They?—are there lest the heat of the telegraph fluid inflame the post-es!" He laid his own hand tenderly upon his wife's in response to its warning pressure, yet turned to the sugar-planter and asked:

"Sir, pardon; do I not explain truly?"

The planter, with restrained smile, was about to reply, when some one called, "There she comes!" and every eye was turned to the east.

"Truly!" exclaimed the inquirer, in a voice made rich with emotion. "Truly, she comes! She comes! The iron horse, though they call him 'she'!" He turned to the planter—"Ah! sir, why say they thus many or thus many horse-power, when truly"—his finger-tip pattered upon his temple—"truly it is mind-power!"

The planter, smiling decorously, turned away, and the speaker looked again down the long vacant track to where the small dark focus of every one's attention was growing on the sight. He spoke again, in lower voice but with larger emotion.

"Mind-power! thought-power! knowledge-power! learning and thinking power!" He caught his wife's arm. "See! see, Sidonie, my dear! See her enhancing in magnitude so fastly approaching!" As he spoke a puff of white vapor lifted from the object and spread out against the blue, the sunbeams turned it to silver and pearl, and a moment later came the far-away, long, wild scream of the locomotive.

"Retire!" exclaimed the husband, drawing back all his gazing companions at once. "Retire! retire! the whisttel is to signify warning to retire from too close the edge of the galerie! There! rest at this point. 'Tis far enough. Now, each and all resolve to stand and shrink not whilst that iron mare, eating coal, drinking hot water, and spitting fire, shall seem, but falsely, threatening to come on the platform. Ah! Claude!" he cried to the youngest of the group, "now shall you behold what I have told you—that vast am-azement of civilize-ation anni-high-lating space and also time at the tune of twenty miles the hour!" He wheeled upon the planter—"Sir, do I exaggerate?"

"Forty miles," replied the planter; "sometimes fifty."

"Friends,—confirmated! more than twicefold confirmated. Forty, sometimes fifty! Thou heardest it, Maximian Roussel! Not from me, but from the gentleman himself! Forty, sometimes fifty! Such the march, the forward march of civilize-ation!"

His words were cut short by the unearthly neigh of the engine. Sidonie smote herself backward against her husband.

"Nay, Sidonie, fear thou nothing! Remember, dear Sidonie, thy promise of self-control! Stand boldly still, St. Pierre; both father and son, stand." The speaker was unheard. Hissing, clanging, thundering, and shaking the earth, the engine and train loomed up to the platform and stopped.

"Come!" cried Bonaventure Deschamps; "lose no moment, dear friends. Tide and time—even less the railroad—wait for nobody. Claude, remember; give your ticket of passage to none save the conductor only. 'Tis print' in letter' of gold on front his cap—'Conductor'—Stop! he is here.—Sir, this young man, inexperienced, is taking passage for"—

"Shoot him aboard," replied a uniformed man, and walked on without a pause. Claude moved toward the train. Bonaventure seized him by both arms and gazed on him.

"Claude St. Pierre! Claude, my boy, pride of Grande Pointe, second only with Sidonie, farewell!"

Tears leaped into the eyes of both. Bonaventure snatched Claude to his arms and kissed him. It was less than nothing to him that every eye on and off the train was on them. He relaxed his grasp. "Sidonie! tell him farewell!—ah! nay! shake not hands only! Kiss her, Claude! Kiss him, my own Sidonie, kiss him farewell!"

It was done. Claude blushed red, and Sidonie stepped back, wiping her eyes. Maximian moved into the void, and smiling gave his hand to the young adventurer.

"Adjieu, Claude." He waved a hand awkwardly. "Teck care you'seff," and dropped the hand audibly against his thigh.

Claude's eye sought his father. St. Pierre pressed forward, laid his right hand upon his son's shoulder, and gazed into his face. His voice was low and husky. He smiled.

"Claude,"—tears rose in his eyes, but he swallowed them down,—"Claude,—my baby,"—and the flood came. The engine-bell rang. The conductor gave the warning word, the youth leaped upon his father's neck. St. Pierre thrust him off, caught his two cheeks between fluttering palms and kissed him violently; the train moved, the young man leaped aboard, the blue uniforms disappeared, save one on the rear platform, the bell ceased, the gliding mass shrunk and dwindled away, the rails clicked more and more softly, the tearful group drew closer together as they gazed after the now-unheard train. It melted to a point and disappeared, the stillness of forest and prairie fell again upon the place, the soaring sun shone down, and Claude St. Pierre was gone to seek his fortune.



CHAPTER III.

THE TAVERN FIRESIDE.

I call to mind a certain wild, dark night in November. St. Pierre lay under his palmetto thatch in the forest behind Grande Pointe, and could not sleep for listening to the wind, and wondering where his son was, in that wild Texas norther. On the Mississippi a steamer, upward bound, that had whistled to land at Belmont or Belle Alliance plantation, seemed to be staying there afraid to venture away. Miles southward beyond the river and the lands on that side, Lake des Allemands was combing with the tempest and hissing with the rain. Still farther away, on the little bayou and at the railway-station in the edge of the swamp that we already know, and westward over the prairie where Claude had vanished into the world, all life was hidden and mute. And farther still, leagues and leagues away, the mad tempest was riding the white-caps in Berwick's Bay and Grande Lake; and yet beyond, beyond New Iberia, and up by Carancro, and around again by St. Martinville, Breaux Bridge, Grand Coteau, and Opelousas, and down once more across the prairies of Vermilion, the marshes about Cote Blanche Bay, and the islands in the Gulf, it came bounding, screaming, and buffeting. And all the way across that open sweep from Mermentau to Cote Gelee it was tearing the rain to mist and freezing it wherever it fell, only lulling and warming a little about Joseph Jefferson's Island, as if that prank were too mean a trick to play upon his orange-groves.

In Vermilionville the wind came around every corner piercing and pinching to the bone. The walking was slippery; and though it was still early bedtime and the ruddy lamp-light filled the wet panes of some window every here and there, scarce a soul was stirring without, on horse or afoot, to be guided by its kindly glow.

At the corner of two streets quite away from the court-house square, a white frame tavern, with a wooden Greek porch filling its whole two-story front and a balcony built within the porch at the second-story windows in oddest fashion, was glowing with hospitable firelight. It was not nearly the largest inn of the place, nor the oldest, nor the newest, nor the most accessible. There was no clink of glass there. Yet in this, only third year of its present management, it was the place where those who knew best always put up.

Around the waiting-room fire this evening sat a goodly semicircle of men,—commercial travellers. Some of them were quite dry and comfortable, and wore an air of superior fortune over others whose shoes and lower garments sent out more or less steam and odor toward the open fireplace. Several were smoking. One who neither smoked nor steamed stood with his back to the fire and the skirts of his coat lifted forward on his wrists. He was a rather short, slight, nervy man, about thirty years of age, with a wide pink baldness running so far back from his prominent temples and forehead that when he tipped his face toward the blue joists overhead, enjoying the fatigue of a well-filled day, his polished skull sent back the firelight brilliantly. There was a light skirmish of conversation going on, in which he took no part. No one seemed really acquainted with another. Presently a man sitting next on the left of him put away a quill toothpick in his watch-pocket, looked up into the face of the standing man, and said, with a faint smile:

"That job's done!"

With friendly gravity the other looked down and replied, "I never use a quill toothpick."

"Yes," said the one who sat, "it's bad. Still I do it."

"Nothing," continued the other,—"nothing harder than a sharpened white-pine match should ever go between the teeth. Brush thoroughly but not violently once or twice daily with a moderately stiff brush dipped in soft water into which has been dropped a few drops of the tincture of myrrh. A brush of badger's hair is best. If tartar accumulates, have it removed by a dentist. Do not bite thread or crack nuts with the teeth, or use the teeth for other purposes than those for which nature designed them." He bent toward his hearer with a smile of irresistible sweetness, drew his lips away from his gums, snapped his teeth together loudly twice or thrice, and smiled again, modestly. The other man sought defence in buoyancy of manner.

"Right you are!" he chirruped. He reached up to his adviser's blue and crimson neck-scarf, and laid his finger and thumb upon a large, solitary pear-shaped pearl. "You're like me; you believe in the real thing."

"I do," said the pearl's owner; "and I like people that like the real thing. A pearl of the first water is real. There's no sham there; no deception—except the iridescence, which is, as you doubtless know, an optical illusion attributable to the intervention of rays of light reflected from microscopic corrugations of the nacreous surface. But for that our eye is to blame, not the pearl. See?"

The seated man did not reply; but another man on the speaker's right, a large man, widest at the waist, leaned across the arm of his chair to scrutinize the jewel. Its owner turned his throat for the inspection, despite a certain grumness and crocodilian aggressiveness in the man's interest.

"I like a diamond, myself," said the new on-looker, dropped back in his chair, and met the eyes of the pearl's owner with a heavy glance.

"Tastes differ," kindly responded the wearer of the pearl. "Are you acquainted with the language of gems?"

The big-waisted man gave a negative grunt, and spat bravely into the fire. "Didn't know gems could talk," he said.

"They do not talk, they speak," responded their serene interpreter. The company in general noticed that, with all his amiability of tone and manner, his mild eyes held the big-waisted man with an uncomfortable steadiness. "They speak not to the ear, but to the eye and to the thought:

'Thought is deeper than all speech; Feeling deeper than all thought; Souls to souls can never teach What unto themselves was taught.'"

The speaker's victim writhed, but the riveted gaze and an uplifted finger pinioned him. "You should know—every one should know—the language of gems. There is a language of flowers:

'To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'

But the language of gems is as much more important than that of flowers as the imperishable gem is itself more enduring than the withering, the evanescent blossom. A gentleman may not with safety present to a lady a gem of whose accompanying sentiment he is ignorant. But with the language of gems understood between them, how could a sentiment be more exquisitely or more acceptably expressed than by the gift of a costly gem uttering that sentiment with an unspoken eloquence! Did you but know the language of gems, your choice would not be the diamond. 'Diamond me no diamonds,' emblems of pride—

'Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of humankind pass by.'

"Your choice would have been the pearl, symbol of modest loveliness.

'Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;'

'Orient pearls at random strung;'

'Fold, little trembler, thy fluttering wing, Freely partake of love's fathomless spring; So hallowed thy presence, the spirit within Hath whispered, "The angels protect thee from sin."'"

The speaker ceased, with his glance hovering caressingly over the little trembler with fluttering wing, that is, the big-waisted man. The company sat in listening expectancy; and the big-waisted man, whose eyes had long ago sought refuge in the fire, lifted them and said, satirically, "Go on," at the same time trying to buy his way out with a smile.

"It's your turn," quickly responded the jewel's owner, with something droll in his manner that made the company laugh at the other's expense. The big-waisted man kindled, then smiled again, and said:

"Was that emblem of modest loveliness give' to you symbolically, or did you present it to yourself?"

"I took it for a debt," replied the wearer, bowing joyously.

"Ah!" said the other. "Well, I s'pose it was either that or her furniture?"

"Thanks, yes." There was a pause, and then the pearl's owner spoke on. "Strange fact. That was years ago. And yet"—he fondled his gem with thumb and finger and tender glance—"you're the first man I've met to whom I could sincerely and symbolically present it, and you don't want it. I'm sorry."

"I see," said the big-waisted man, glaring at him.

"So do I," responded the pearl's owner. A smile went round, and the company sat looking into the fire. Outside the wind growled and scolded, shook and slapped the house, and thrashed it with the rain. A man sitting against the chimney said:

"If this storm keeps on six hours longer I reduce my estimate of the cotton-crop sixty-five thousand bales." But no one responded; and as the importance died out of his face he dropped his gaze into the fire with a pretence of deep meditation. Presently another, a good-looking young fellow, said:

"Well, gents, I never cared much for jewelry. But I like a nice scarf-pin; it's nobby. And I like a handsome seal-ring." He drew one from a rather chubby finger, and passed it to his next neighbor, following it with his eyes, and adding: "That's said to be a real intaglio. But—now, one thing I don't like, that's to see a lady wear a quantity of diamond rings outside of her glove, and heavy gold chains, and"—He was interrupted. A long man, with legs stiffened out to the fire, lifted a cigar between two fingers, sent a soft jet of smoke into the air, and began monotonously:

"'Chains on a Southern woman? Chains?'

I know the lady that wrote that piece." He suddenly gathered himself up for some large effort. "I can't recite it as she used to, but"—And to the joy of all he was interrupted.

"Gentlemen," said one, throwing a cigarette stump into the fire, "that brings up the subject of the war. By the by, do you know what that war cost the Government of the United States?" He glanced from one to another until his eye reached the wearer of the pearl, who had faced about, and stood now, with the jewel glistening in the firelight, and who promptly said:

"Yes; how much?"

"Well," said the first questioner with sudden caution, "I may be mistaken, but I've heard that it cost six—I think they say six—billion dollars. Didn't it?"

"It did," replied the other, with a smile of friendly commendation; "it cost six billion, one hundred and eighty-nine million, nine hundred and twenty-nine thousand, nine hundred and eight dollars. The largest item is interest; one billion, seven hundred and one million, two hundred and fifty-six thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight dollars, forty-two cents. The next largest, the pay of troops; the next, clothing the army. If there's any item of the war's expenses you would like to know, ask me. Capturing president Confederate States—ninety-seven thousand and thirty-one dollars, three cents." The speaker's manner grew almost gay. The other smiled defensively, and responded:

"You've got a good memory for sta-stistics. I haven't; and yet I always did like sta-stistics. I'm no sta-stitian, and yet if I had the time sta-stistics would be my favorite study; I s'pose it's yours."

The wearer of the pearl shook his head. "No. But I like it. I like the style of mind that likes it." The two bowed with playful graciousness to each other. "Yes, I do. And I've studied it, some little. I can tell you the best time of every celebrated trotter in this country; the quickest trip a steamer ever made between Queenstown and New York, New York and Queenstown, New Orleans and New York; the greatest speed ever made on a railroad or by a yacht, pedestrian, carrier-pigeon, or defaulting cashier; the rate of postage to every foreign country; the excess of women over men in every State of the Union so afflicted—or blessed, according to how you look at it; the number of volumes in each of the world's ten largest libraries; the salary of every officer of the United-States Government; the average duration of life in a man, elephant, lion, horse, anaconda, tortoise, camel, rabbit, ass, etcetera-etcetera; the age of every crowned head in Europe; each State's legal and commercial rate of interest; and how long it takes a healthy boy to digest apples, baked beans, cabbage, dates, eggs, fish, green corn, h, i, j, k, l-m-n-o-p, quinces, rice, shrimps, tripe, veal, yams, and any thing you can cook commencing with z. It's a fascinating study. But it's not my favorite.

'The proper study of mankind is man. * * * * * Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!'

"I love to study human nature. That's my favorite study! The art of reading the inner human nature by the outer aspect is of immeasurable interest and boundless practical value, and the man who can practise it skilfully and apply it sagaciously is on the high road to fortune, and why? Because to know it thoroughly is to know whom to trust and how far; to select wisely a friend, a confidant, a partner in any enterprise; to shun the untrustworthy, to anticipate and turn to our personal advantage the merits, faults, and deficiencies of all, and to evolve from their character such practical results as we may choose for our own ends; but a thorough knowledge is attained only by incessant observation and long practice; like music, it demands a special talent possessed by different individuals in variable quantity or not at all. You, gentlemen, all are, what I am not, commercial tourists. Before you I must be modest. You, each of you, have been chosen from surrounding hundreds or thousands for your superior ability, natural or acquired, to scan the human face and form and know whereof you see. I look you in the eye—you look me in the eye—for the eye, though it does not tell all, tells much—it is the key of character—it has been called the mirror of the soul—

'And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.'

And so looking you read me. You say to yourself, 'There's a man with no concealments, yet who speaks not till he's spoken to; knows when to stop, and stops.' You note my pale eyebrows, my slightly prominent and pointed chin, somewhat over-sized mouth; small, well-spread ears, faintly aquiline nose; fine, thin, blonde hair, a depression in the skull where the bump of self-conceit ought to be, and you say, 'A man that knows his talents without being vain of them; who not only minds his own business, but loves it, and who in that business, be it buggy-whips or be it washine, or be it something far nobler,'—which, let me say modestly, it is,—'simply goes to the head of the class and stays there.' Yes, sirs, if I say that reading the human countenance is one of my accomplishments, I am diffidently mindful that in this company, I, myself, am read, perused; no other probably so well read—I mean so exhaustively perused. For there is one thing about me, gentlemen, if you'll allow me to say it, I'm short metre, large print, and open to the public seven days in the week. And yet you probably all make one mistake about me: you take me for the alumni of some university. Not so. I'm a self-made man. I made myself; and considering that I'm the first man I ever made, I think—pardon the seeming egotism—I think I've done well. A few years ago there dwelt in humble obscurity among the granite hills of New England, earning his bread by the sweat of his brow upon his father's farm, a youth to fortune and to fame unknown. But one day a voice within him said, 'Tarbox'—George W.,—namesake of the man who never told a lie,—'do you want to succeed in life? Then leave the production of tobacco and cider to unambitious age, and find that business wherein you can always give a man ten times as much for his dollar as his dollar is worth.' The meaning was plain, and from that time forth young Tarbox aspired to become a book-agent. 'Twas not long ere he, like

'Young Harry Bluff, left his friends and his home, And his dear native land, o'er the wide world to roam.'

Books became his line, and full soon he was the head of the line. And why? Was it because in the first short twelve months of his career he sold, delivered, and got the money for, 5107 copies of 'Mend-me-at-Home'? No. Was it, then, because three years later he sold in one year, with no other assistance than a man to drive the horse and wagon, hold the blackboard, and hand out the books, 10,003 copies of 'Rapid 'Rithmetic'? It was not. Was it, then, because in 1878, reading aright the public mind, he said to his publishers, whose confidence in him was unbounded, 'It ain't "Mend-me-at-Home" the people want most, nor "Rapid 'Rithmetic," nor "Heal Thyself," nor "I meet the Emergency," nor the "Bouquet of Poetry and Song." What they want is all these in one.'—'Abridged?' said the publishers. 'Enlarged!' said young Tarbox,—'enlarged and copiously illustrated, complete in one volume, price, cloth, three dollars, sheep four, half morocco, gilt edges, five; real value to the subscriber, two hundred and fifty; title, "The Album of Universal Information; author, G. W. Tarbox; editor, G. W. T.; agent for the United States, the Canadas, and Mexico, G. W. Tarbox," that is to say, myself.' That, gentlemen, is the reason I stand at the head of my line; not merely because on every copy sold I make an author's as well as a solicitor's margin; but because, being the author, I know whereof I sell. A man that's got my book has got a college education; and when a man taps me,—for, gentlemen, I never spout until I'm tapped,—and information bursts from me like water from a street hydrant, and he comes to find out that every thing I tell is in that wonderful book, and that every thing that is in that wonderful book I can tell, he wants to own a copy; and when I tell him I can't spare my sample copy, but I'll take his subscription, he smiles gratefully"—

A cold, wet blast, rushing into the room from the hall, betrayed the opening of the front door. The door was shut again, and a well-formed, muscular young man who had entered stood in the parlor doorway lifting his hat from his head, shaking the rain from it, and looking at it with amused diffidence. Mr. Tarbox turned about once more with his back to the fire, gave the figure a quick glance of scrutiny, then a second and longer one, and then dropped his eyes to the floor. The big-waisted man shifted his chair, tipped it back, and said:

"He smiles gratefully, you say?"

"Yes."

"And subscribes?"

"If he's got any sense," Mr. Tarbox replied in a pre-occupied tone. His eyes were on the young man who still stood in the door. This person must have reached the house in some covered conveyance. Even his boot-tops were dry or nearly so. He was rather pleasing to see; of good stature, his clothing cheap. A dark-blue flannel sack of the ready-made sort hung on him not too well. Light as the garment was, he showed no sign that he felt the penetrating cold out of which he had just come. His throat and beardless face had the good brown of outdoor life, his broad chest strained the two buttons of his sack, his head was well-poised, his feet were shapely, and but for somewhat too much roundness about the shoulder-blades, noticeable in the side view as he carefully stood a long, queer package that was not buggy-whips against the hat-rack, it would have been fair to pronounce him an athlete.

The eyes of the fireside group were turned toward him; but not upon him. They rested on a girl of sixteen who had come down the hall, and was standing before the new-comer just beyond the door. The registry-book was just there on a desk in the hall. She stood with a freshly dipped pen in her hand, ignoring the gaze from the fireside with a faintly overdone calmness of face. The new guest came forward, and, in a manner that showed slender acquaintance with the operation, slowly registered his name and address.

He did it with such pains-taking, that, upside down as the writing was, she read it as he wrote. As the Christian name appeared, her perfunctory glance became attention. As the surname followed, the attention became interest and recognition. And as the address was added, Mr. Tarbox detected pleasure dancing behind the long fringe of her discreet eyes, and marked their stolen glance of quick inspection upon the short, dark locks and strong young form still bent over the last strokes of the writing. But when he straightened up, carefully shut the book, and fixed his brown eyes upon hers in guileless expectation of instructions, he saw nothing to indicate that he was not the entire stranger that she was to him.

"You done had sopper?" she asked. The uncommon kindness of such a question at such an hour of a tavern's evening was lost on the young man's obvious inexperience, and as one schooled to the hap-hazard of forest and field he merely replied:

"Naw, I didn' had any."

The girl turned—what a wealth of black hair she had!—and disappeared as she moved away along the hall. Her voice was heard: "Mamma?" Then there was the silence of an unheard consultation. The young man moved a step or two into the parlor and returned toward the door as a light double foot-fall approached again down the hall and the girl appeared once more, somewhat preceded by a small, tired-looking, pretty woman some thirty-five years of age, of slow, self-contained movement and clear, meditative eyes.

But the guest, too, had been re-enforced. A man had come silently from the fireside, taken his hand, and now, near the doorway, was softly shaking it and smiling. Surprise, pleasure, and reverential regard were mingled in the young man's face, and his open mouth was gasping—

"Mister Tarbox!"

"Claude St. Pierre, after six years, I'm glad to see you.—Madame, take good care of Claude.—No fear but she will, my boy; if anybody in Louisiana knows how to take care of a traveller, it's Madame Beausoleil." He smiled for all. The daughter's large black eyes danced, but the mother asked Claude, with unmoved countenance and soft tone:

"You are Claude St. Pierre?—from Gran' Point'?"

"Yass."

"Dass lately since you left yondah?"

"About two month'."

"Bonaventure Deschamps—he was well?"

"Yass." Claude's eyes were full of a glad surprise, and asked a question that his lips did not dare to venture upon. Madame Beausoleil read it, and she said:

"We was raise' together, Bonaventure and me." She waved her hand toward her daughter. "He teach her to read. Seet down to the fire; we make you some sopper."



CHAPTER IV.

MARGUERITE.

Out in the kitchen, while the coffee was dripping and the ham and eggs frying, the mother was very silent, and the daughter said little, but followed her now and then with furtive liftings of her young black eyes. Marguerite remembered Bonaventure Deschamps well and lovingly. For years she had seen the letters that at long intervals came from him at Grande Pointe to her mother here. In almost every one of them she had read high praises of Claude. He had grown, thus, to be the hero of her imagination. She had wondered if it could ever happen that he would come within her sight, and if so, when, where, how. And now, here at a time of all times when it would have seemed least possible, he had, as it were, rained down.

She wondered to-night, with more definiteness of thought than ever before, what were the deep feelings which her reticent little mother—Marguerite was an inch the taller—kept hid in that dear breast. Rarely had emotion moved it. She remembered its terrible heavings at the time of her father's death, and the later silent downpour of tears when her only sister and brother were taken in one day. Since then, those eyes had rarely been wet; yet more than once or twice she had seen tears in them when they were reading a letter from Grande Pointe. Had her mother ever had something more than a sister's love for Bonaventure? Had Bonaventure loved her? And when? Before her marriage, or after her widowhood?

The only answer that came to her as she now stood, knife in hand, by the griddle, was a roar of laughter that found its way through the hall, the dining-room, and two closed doors, from the men about the waiting-room fireside. That was the third time she had heard it. What could have put them so soon into such gay mood? Could it be Claude? Somehow she hoped it was not. Her mother reminded her that the batter-cakes would burn. She quickly turned them. The laugh came again.

When by and by she went to bid Claude to his repast, the laughter, as she reached the door of the waiting-room, burst upon her as the storm would have done had she opened the front door. It came from all but Claude and Mr. Tarbox. Claude sat with a knee in his hands, smiling. The semicircle had widened out from the fire, and in the midst Mr. Tarbox stood telling a story, of which Grande Pointe was the scene, Bonaventure Deschamps the hero, a school-examination the circumstance, and he, G. W., the accidental arbiter of destinies that hung upon its results. The big-waisted man had retired for the night, and half an eye could see that the story-teller had captivated the whole remaining audience. He was just at the end as Marguerite re-appeared at the door. The laugh suddenly ceased, and then all rose; it was high bedtime.

"And did they get married?" asked one. Three or four gathered close to hear the answer.

"Who? Sidonie and Bonnyventure? Yes. I didn't stay to see. I went away into Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama, and just only a few weeks ago took a notion to try this Attakapas and Opelousas region. But that's what Claude tells me to-night—married more than five years ago.—Claude, your supper wants you. Want me to go out and sit with you? Oh, no trouble! not the slightest! It will make me feel as if I was nearer to Bonnyventure."

And so the group about Claude's late supper numbered four. And because each had known Bonaventure, though each in a very different way from any other, they were four friends when Claude had demolished the ham and eggs, the strong black coffee, and the griddle-cakes and sirop-de-batterie.

At the top of the hall stairway, as Mr. Tarbox was on his way to bed, one of the dispersed fireside circle stopped him, saying:

"That's an awful good story!"

"I wouldn't try a poor one on you."

"Oh!—but really, now, in good earnest, it is good. It's good in more ways than one. Now, you know, that man, hid away there in the swamp at Grande Pointe, he little thinks that six or eight men away off here in Vermilionville are going to bed to-night better men—that's it, sir—yes, sir, that's it—yes, sir!—better men—just for having heard of him!"

Mr. Tarbox smiled with affectionate approval, and began to move away; but the other put out a hand—

"Say, look here; I'm going away on that two o'clock train to-night. I want that book of yours. And I don't want to subscribe and wait. I want the book now. That's my way. I'm just that kind of a man; I'm the nowest man you ever met up with. That book's just the kind of thing for a man like me who ain't got no time to go exhaustively delving and investigating and researching into things, and yet has got to keep as sharp as a brier."

Mr. Tarbox, on looking into his baggage, found he could oblige this person. Before night fell again he had done virtually the same thing, one by one, for all the rest. By that time they were all gone; but Mr. Tarbox made Vermilionville his base of operations for several days.

Claude also tarried. For reasons presently to appear, the "ladies parlor," a small room behind the waiting-room, with just one door, which let into the hall at the hall's inner end, was given up to his use; and of evenings not only Mr. Tarbox, but Marguerite and her mother as well, met with him, gathering familiarly about a lamp that other male lodgers were not invited to hover around.

The group was not idle. Mr. Tarbox held big hanks of blue and yellow yarn, which Zosephine wound off into balls. A square table quite filled the centre of the room. There was a confusion of objects on it, and now on one side and now on another Claude leaned over it and slowly toiled, from morning until evening alone, and in the evening with these three about him; Marguerite, with her sewing dropped upon the floor, watching his work with an interest almost wholly silent, only making now and then a murmured comment, her eyes passing at intervals from his pre-occupied eyes to his hands, and her hand now and then guessing and supplying his want as he looked for one thing or another that had got out of sight. What was he doing?

As to Marguerite, more than he was aware of, Zosephine Beausoleil saw, and was already casting about somewhat anxiously in her mind to think what, if any thing, ought to be done about it. She saw her child's sewing lie forgotten on the floor, and the eyes that should have been following the needle, fixed often on the absorbed, unconscious, boyish-manly face so near by. She saw them scanning the bent brows, the smooth bronzed cheek, the purposeful mouth, and the unusual length of dark eyelashes that gave its charm to the whole face; and she saw them quickly withdrawn whenever the face with those lashes was lifted and an unsuspecting smile of young companionship broke slowly about the relaxing lips and the soft, deep-curtained eyes. No; Claude little knew what he was doing. Neither did Marguerite. But, aside from her, what was his occupation? I will explain.

About five weeks earlier than this, a passenger on an eastward-bound train of Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railway stood at the rear door of the last coach, eying critically the track as it glided swiftly from under the train and shrank perpetually into the west. The coach was nearly empty. No one was near him save the brakeman, and by and by he took his attention from the track and let it rest on this person. There he found a singular attraction. Had he seen that face before, or why did it provoke vague reminiscences of great cypresses overhead, and deep-shaded leafy distances with bayous winding out of sight through them, and cane-brakes impenetrable to the eye, and axe-strokes—heard but unseen—slashing through them only a few feet away? Suddenly he knew.

"Wasn't it your father," he said, "who was my guide up Bayou des Acadiens and Blind River the time I made the survey in that big swamp north of Grande Pointe? Isn't your name Claude St. Pierre?" And presently they were acquainted.

"You know I took a great fancy to your father. And you've been clear through the arithmetic twice? Why, see here; you're just the sort of man I—Look here; don't you want to learn to be a surveyor?" The questioner saw that same ambition which had pleased him so in the father, leap for joy in the son's eyes.

An agreement was quickly reached. Then the surveyor wandered into another coach, and nothing more passed between them that day save one matter, which, though trivial, has its place. When the surveyor returned to the rear train, Claude was in a corner seat gazing pensively through the window and out across the wide, backward-flying, purpling green cane-fields of St. Mary, to where on the far left the live-oaks of Bayou Teche seemed hoveringly to follow on the flank of their whooping and swaggering railway-train. Claude turned and met the stranger's regard with a faint smile. His new friend spoke first.

"Matters may turn out so that we can have your father"—

Claude's eyes answered with a glad flash. "Dass what I was t'inkin'!" he said, with a soft glow that staid even when he fell again into revery.

But when the engineer—for it seems that he was an engineer, chief of a party engaged in redeeming some extensive waste swamp and marsh lands—when the chief engineer, on the third day afterward, drew near the place where he suddenly recollected Claude would be waiting to enter his service, and recalled this part of their previous interview, he said to himself, "No, it would be good for the father, but not best for the son," and fell to thinking how often parents are called upon to wrench their affections down into cruel bounds to make the foundations of their children's prosperity.

Claude widened to his new experience with the rapidity of something hatched out of a shell. Moreover, accident was in his favor; the party was short-handed in its upper ranks, and Claude found himself by this stress taken into larger and larger tasks as fast as he could, though ever so crudely, qualify for them.

"'Tisn't at all the best thing for you," said one of the surveyors, "but I'll lend you some books that will teach you the why as well as the how."

In the use of these books by lantern-light certain skill with the pen showed itself; and when at length one day a despatch reached camp from the absent "chief" stating that in two or three days certain matters would take him to Vermilionville, and ordering that some one be sent at once with all necessary field notes and appliances, and give his undivided time to the making of certain urgently needed maps, and the only real draughtsman of the party was ill with swamp-fever, Claude was sent.

On his last half-day's journey toward the place, he had fallen in with an old gentleman whom others called "Governor," a tall, trim figure, bent but little under fourscore years, with cheerful voice and ready speech, and eyes hidden behind dark glasses and flickering in their deep sockets.

"Go to Madame Beausoleil's," he advised Claude. "That is the place for you. Excellent person; I've known her from childhood; a woman worthy a higher station." And so, all by accident, chance upon chance, here was Claude making maps; and this delightful work, he thought, was really all he was doing, in Zosephine's little inner parlor.

By and by it was done. The engineer had not yet arrived. The storm had delayed work in one place and undone work in another, and he was detained beyond expectation. But a letter said he would come in a day or two more, and some maps of earlier surveys, drawn by skilled workmen in great New Orleans, arrived; seeing which, Claude blushed for his own and fell to work to make them over.

"If at first you not succeed," said Claude,—

"Try—try aga-a-ain," responded Marguerite; "Bonaventure learn me that poetry; and you?"

"Yass," said Claude. He stood looking down at his work and not seeing it. What he saw was Grande Pointe in the sunset hour of a spring day six years gone, the wet, spongy margin of a tiny bayou under his feet, the great swamp at his back, the leafy undergrowth all around; his canoe and paddle waiting for him, and Bonaventure repeating to him—swamp urchin of fourteen—the costliest words of kindness—to both of them the costliest—that he had ever heard, ending with these two that Marguerite had spoken. As he resumed his work, he said, without lifting his eyes:

"Seem' to me 'f I could make myself like any man in dat whole worl', I radder make myself like Bonaventure. And you?"

She was so slow to answer that he looked at her. Even then she merely kept on sweeping her fingers slowly and idly back and forth on the table, and, glancing down upon them, said without enthusiasm: "Yass."

Yet they both loved Bonaventure, each according to knowledge of him. Nor did their common likings stop with him. The things he had taught Claude to love and seek suddenly became the admiration of Marguerite. Aspirations—aspirations!—began to stir and hum in her young heart, and to pour forth like waking bees in the warm presence of spring. Claude was a new interpretation of life to her; as one caught abed by the first sunrise at sea, her whole spirit leaped, with unmeasured self-reproach, into fresh garments and to a new and beautiful stature, and looked out upon a wider heaven and earth than ever it had seen or desired to see before. All at once the life was more than meat and the body than raiment. Presently she sprang to action. In the convent school, whose white belfry you could see from the end of Madame Beausoleil's balcony, whither Zosephine had sent her after teaching her all she herself knew, it had been "the mind for knowledge;" now it was "knowledge for the mind." Mental training and enrichment had a value now, never before dreamed of. The old school-books were got down, recalled from banishment. Nothing ever had been hard to learn, and now she found that all she seemed to have forgotten merely required, like the books, a little beating clear of dust.

And Claude was there to help. "If C"——C!——"having a start of one hundred miles, travels"—so and so, and so and so,—"how fast must I travel in order to"—etc. She cannot work the problem for thinking of what it symbolizes. As C himself takes the slate, her dark eyes, lifted an instant to his, are large with painful meaning, for she sees at a glance she must travel—if the arithmetical is the true answer—more than the whole distance now between them. But Claude says there is an easy way. She draws her chair nearer and nearer to his; he bows over the problem, and she cannot follow his pencil without bending her head very close to his—closer—closer—until fluffy bits of her black hair touch the thick locks on his temples. Look to your child, Zosephine Beausoleil, look to her! Ah! she can look; but what can she do?

She saw the whole matter; saw more than merely an unripe girl smitten with the bright smile, goodly frame, and bewitching eyes of a promising young rustic; saw her heart ennobled, her nature enlarged, and all the best motives of life suddenly illuminated by the presence of one to be mated with whom promised the key-note of all harmonies; promised heart-fellowship in the ever-hoping effort to lift poor daily existence higher and higher out of the dust and into the light. What could she say? If great spirits in men or maidens went always or only with high fortune, a mere Acadian lass, a tavern maiden, were safe enough, come one fate or another. If Marguerite were like many a girl in high ranks and low, to whom any husband were a husband, any snug roof a home, and any living life—But what may a maiden do, or a mother bid her do, when she looks upon the youth so shaped without and within to her young soul's belief in its wants, that all other men are but beasts of the field and creeping things, and he alone Adam? To whom could the widow turn? Father, mother?—Gone to their rest. The cure who had stood over her in baptism, marriage, and bereavement?—Called long ago to higher dignities and wider usefulness in distant fields. Oh for the presence and counsel of Bonaventure! It is true, here was Mr. Tarbox, so kind, and so replete with information; so shrewd and so ready to advise. She spurned the thought of leaning on him; and yet the oft-spurned thought as often returned. Already his generous interest had explored her pecuniary affairs, and his suggestions, too good to be ignored, had moulded them into better shape, and enlarged their net results. And he could tell how many eight-ounce tacks make a pound, and what electricity is, and could cure a wart in ten minutes, and recite "Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" And this evening, the seventh since the storm, when for one weak moment she had allowed the conversation to drift toward wedlock, he had stated a woman's chances of marrying between the ages of fifteen and twenty, to wit, 14-1/2 per cent; and between thirty and thirty-five, 15-1/2.

"Hah!" exclaimed Zosephine, her eyes flashing as they had not done in many a day, "'tis not dat way!—not in Opelousas!"

"Arithmetically speaking!" the statistician quickly explained. He ventured to lay a forefinger on the back of her hand, but one glance of her eye removed it. "You see, that's merely arithmetically considered. Now, of course, looking at it geographically—why, of course! And—why, as to that, there are ladies"—

Madame Beausoleil rose, left Mr. Tarbox holding the yarn, and went down the hall, whose outer door had opened and shut. A moment later she entered the room again.

"Claude!"

Marguerite's heart sank. Her guess was right: the chief engineer had come. And early in the morning Claude was gone.



CHAPTER V.

FATHER AND SON.

Such strange things storms do,—here purifying the air, yonder treading down rich harvests, now replenishing the streams, and now strewing shores with wrecks; here a blessing, there a calamity. See what this one had done for Marguerite! Well, what? She could not lament; she dared not rejoice. Oh! if she were Claude and Claude were she, how quickly—

She wondered how many miles a day she could learn to walk if she should start out into the world on foot to find somebody, as she had heard that Bonaventure had once done to find her mother's lover. There are no Bonaventures now, she thinks, in these decayed times.

"Mamma,"—her speech was French,—"why do we never see Bonaventure? How far is it to Grande Pointe?"

"Ah! my child, a hundred miles; even more."

"And to my uncle Rosamond's,—Rosamond Robichaux, on Bayou Terrebonne?"

"Fully as far, and almost the same journey."

There was but one thing to be done,—crush Claude out of her heart.

The storm had left no wounds on Grande Pointe. Every roof was safe, even the old tobacco-shed where Bonaventure had kept school before the schoolhouse was built. The sheltering curtains of deep forest had broken the onset of the wind, and the little cotton, corn, and tobacco fields, already harvested, were merely made a little more tattered and brown. The November air was pure, sunny, and mild, and thrilled every now and then with the note of some lingering bird. A green and bosky confusion still hid house from house and masked from itself the all but motionless human life of the sleepy woods village. Only an adventitious China-tree here and there had been stripped of its golden foliage, and kept but its ripened berries with the red birds darting and fluttering around them like so many hiccoughing Comanches about a dramseller's tent. And here, if one must tell a thing so painful, our old friend the mocking-bird, neglecting his faithful wife and letting his home go to decay, kept dropping in, all hours of the day, tasting the berries' rank pulp, stimulating, stimulating, drowning care, you know,—"Lost so many children, and the rest gone off in ungrateful forgetfulness of their old hard-working father; yes;" and ready to sing or fight, just as any other creature happened not to wish; and going home in the evening scolding and swaggering, and getting to bed barely able to hang on to the roost. It would have been bad enough, even for a man; but for a bird—and a mocking-bird!

But the storm wrought a great change in one small house not in Grande Pointe, yet of it. Until the storm, ever since the day St. Pierre had returned from the little railway-station where Claude had taken the cars, he had seemed as patiently resigned to the new loneliness of Bayou des Acadiens as his thatched hut, which day by day sat so silent between the edges of the dark forest and the darker stream, looking out beyond the farther bank, and far over the green waste of rushes with its swarms of blackbirds sweeping capriciously now this way and now that, and the phantom cloud-shadows passing slowly across from one far line of cypress wood to another. But since that night when the hut's solitary occupant could not sleep for the winds and for thought of Claude, there was a great difference inside. And this did not diminish; it grew. It is hard for a man to be both father and mother, and at the same time be childless. The bonds of this condition began slowly to tighten around St. Pierre's heart and then to cut into it. And so, the same day on which Claude in Vermilionville left the Beausoleils' tavern, the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, ever in his mind's eye, was empty, and in Grande Pointe his father stood on the one low step at the closed door of Bonaventure's little frame schoolhouse.

He had been there a full minute and had not knocked. Every movement, to-day, came only after an inward struggle. Many associations crowded his mind on this doorstep. Six years before, almost on this spot, a mere brier-patch then, he and Maximian Roussel had risen from the grassy earth and given the first two welcoming hand-grasps to the schoolmaster. And now, as one result, Claude, who did not know his letters then, was rising—nay, had risen—to greatness! Claude, whom once he would have been glad to make a good fisherman and swamper, or at the utmost a sugar-boiler, was now a greater, in rank at least, than the very schoolmaster. Truly "knowledge is power"—alas! yes; for it had stolen away that same Claude. The College Point priest's warning had come true: it was "good-by to Grande Pointe!"—Nay, nay, it must not be! Is that the kind of power education is? Power to tear children from their parents? Power to expose their young heads to midnight storms? Power to make them eager to go, and willing to stay away, from their paternal homes? Then indeed the priest had said only too truly, that these public schools teach every thing except morals and religion! From the depth of St. Pierre's heart there quickly came a denial of the charge; and on the moment, like a chanted response, there fell upon his listening ear a monotonous intonation from within the door. A reading-class had begun its exercise. He knew the words by heart, so often had Claude and he read them together. He followed the last stanza silently with his own lips.

"Remember, child, remember That you love, with all your might, The God who watches o'er us And gives us each delight, Who guards us ever in the day, And saves as in the night."

Tears filled the swamper's eyes. He moved as if to leave the place. But again he paused, with one foot half lowered to the ground. His jaws set, a frown came between his eyes; he drew back the foot, turned again to the door, and gave a loud, peremptory knock.

Bonaventure came to the door. Anxiety quickly overspread his face as he saw the gloom on St. Pierre's. He stood on the outer edge of the sill, and drew the door after him.

"I got good news," said St. Pierre, with no softening of countenance.

"Good news?"

"Yass.—I goin' make Claude come home."

Bonaventure could only look at him in amazement. St. Pierre looked away and continued:

"'S no use. Can't stand it no longer." He turned suddenly upon the schoolmaster. "Why you di'n' tell me ed'cation goin' teck my boy 'way from me?" In Bonaventure a look of distressful self-justification quickly changed to one of anxious compassion.

"Wait!" he said. He went back into the schoolroom, leaving St. Pierre in the open door, and said:

"Dear chil'run, I perceive generally the aspects of fatigue. You have been good scholars. I pronounce a half-hollyday till to-morrow morning. Come, each and every one, with lessons complete."

The children dispersed peaceably, jostling one another to shake the schoolmaster's hand as they passed him. When they were gone he put on his coarse straw hat, and the two men walked slowly, conversing as they went, down the green road that years before had first brought the educator to Grande Pointe.

"Dear friend," said the schoolmaster, "shall education be to blame for this separation? Is not also non-education responsible? Is it not by the non-education of Grande Pointe that there is nothing fit here for Claude's staying?"

"You stay!"

"I? I stay? Ah! sir, I stay, yes! Because like Claude, leaving my home and seeking by wandering to find the true place of my utility, a voice spake that I come at Grande Pointe. Behole me! as far from my childhood home as Claude from his. Friend,—ah! friend, what shall I,—shall Claude,—shall any man do with education! Keep it? Like a miser his gol'? What shall the ship do when she is load'? Dear friend,"—they halted where another road started away through the underbrush at an abrupt angle on their right,—"where leads this narrow road? To Belle Alliance plantation only, or not also to the whole worl'? So is education! That road here once fetch me at Grande Pointe; the same road fetch Claude away. Education came whispering, 'Claude St. Pierre, come! I have constitute' you citizen of the worl'. Come, come, forgetting self!' Oh, dear friend, education is not for self alone! Nay, even self is not for self!"

"Well, den,"—the deep-voiced woodman stood with one boot on a low stump, fiercely trimming a branch that he had struck from the parent stem with one blow of his big, keen clasp-knife,—"self not for self,—for what he gone off and lef' me in de swamp?"

"Ah, sir!" replied Bonaventure, "what do I unceasingly tell those dear school-chil'run? 'May we not make the most of self, yet not for self?'" He laid his hand upon St. Pierre's shoulder. "And who sent Claude hence if not his unselfish father?"

"I was big fool," said St. Pierre, whittling on.

"Nay, wise! Discovering the great rule of civilize-ation. Every man not for self, but for every other!"

The swamper disclaimed the generous imputation with a shake of the head.

"Naw, I dunno nut'n' 'bout dat. I look out for me and my boy, me.—And beside,"—he abruptly threw away the staff he had trimmed, shut his knife with a snap, and thrust it into his pocket,—"I dawn't see ed'cation make no diff'ence. You say ed'cation—priest say religion—me, I dawn't see neider one make no diff'ence. I see every man look out for hisself and his li'l' crowd. Not you, but"—He waved his hand bitterly toward the world at large.

"Ah, sir!" cried Bonaventure, "'tis not something what you can see all the time, like the horns on a cow! And yet, sir,—and yet!"—he lifted himself upon tiptoe and ran his fingers through his thin hair—"the education that make' no difference is but a dead body! and the religion that make' no difference is a ghost! Behole! behole two thing' in the worl', where all is giving and getting, two thing', contrary, yet resem'ling! 'Tis the left han'—alas, alas!—giving only to get; and the right, blessed of God, getting only to give! How much resem'ling, yet how contrary! The one—han' of all strife; the other—of all peace. And oh! dear friend, there are those who call the one civilize-ation, and the other religion. Civilize-ation? Religion? They are one! They are body and soul! I care not what religion the priest teach you; in God's religion is comprise' the total mecanique of civilize-ation. We are all in it; you, me, Claude, Sidonie; all in it! Each and every at his task, however high, however low, working not to get, but to give, and not to give only to his own li'l' crowd, but to all, to all!" The speaker ceased, for his hearer was nodding his head with sceptical impatience.

"Yass," said the woodman, "yass; but look, Bonaventure. Di'n' you said one time, 'Knowledge is power'?"

"Yes, truly; and it is."

"But what use knowledge be power if goin' give ev't'in' away?"

Bonaventure drew back a step or two, suddenly jerked his hat from his head, and came forward again with arms stretched wide and the hat dangling from his hand. "Because—because God will not let it sta-a-ay given away! 'Give—it shall be give' to you.' Every thing given out into God's worl' come back to us roun' God's worl'! Resem'ling the stirring of water in a bucket."

But St. Pierre frowned. "Yass,—wat' in bucket,—yass. Den no man dawn't keep nut'n'. Dawn't own nut'n' he got."

"Ah! sir, there is a better owning than to own. 'Tis giving, dear friend; 'tis giving. To get? To have? That is not to own. The giver, not the getter; the giver! he is the true owner. Live thou not to get, but to give." Bonaventure's voice trembled; his eyes were full of tears.

The swamper stood up with his own eyes full, but his voice was firm. "Bonaventure, I don't got much. I got dat li'l' shanty on Bayou des Acadiens, and li'l' plunder inside—few kittle', and pan',—cast-net, fish-line', two, t'ree gun', and—my wife' grave, yond' in graveyard. But I got Claude,—my boy, my son. You t'ink God want me give my son to whole worl'?"

The schoolmaster took the woodsman's brown wrist tenderly into both his hands, and said, scarce above a whisper, "He gave His, first. He started it. Who can refuse, He starting it? And thou wilt not refuse." The voice rose—"I see, I see the victory! Well art thou nominated 'St. Pierre!' for on that rock of giving"—

"Naw, sir! Stop!" The swamper dashed the moisture from his eyes and summoned a look of stubborn resolve. "Mo' better you call me St. Pierre because I'm a fisherman what cuss when I git mad. Look! You dawn't want me git Claude back in Gran' Point'. You want me to give, give. Well, all right! I goin' quit Gran' Point' and give myself, me, to Claude. I kin read, I kin write, I t'ink kin do better 'long wid Claude dan livin' all 'lone wid snake' and alligator. I t'ink dass mo' better for everybody; and anyhow, I dawn't care; I dawn't give my son to nobody; I give myself to Claude."

Bonaventure and his friend gazed into each other's wet eyes for a moment. Then the schoolmaster turned, lifted his eyes and one arm toward the west, and exclaimed:

"Ah, Claude! thou receivest the noblest gift in Gran' Point'!"



CHAPTER VI.

CONVERGING LINES.

On the prairies of Vermilion and Lafayette, winter is virtually over by the first week in February. From sky to sky, each tree and field, each plain and plantation grove, are putting on the greenery of a Northern May. Even on Cote Gelee the housewife has persuaded le vieux to lay aside his gun, and the early potatoes are already planted. If the moon be at the full, much ground is ready for the sower; and those ploughmen and pony teams and men working along behind them with big, clumsy hoes, over in yonder field, are planting corn. Those silent, tremulous strands of black that in the morning sky come gliding, high overhead, from the direction of the great sea-marshes and fade into the northern blue, are flocks that have escaped the murderous gun of the pot-hunter. Spring and Summer are driving these before them as the younger and older sister, almost abreast, come laughing, and striving to outrun each other across the Mexican Gulf.

Those two travellers on horseback, so dwarfed by distance, whom you see approaching out of the north-west, you shall presently find have made, in their dress, no provision against cold. At Carancro, some miles away to the north-east, there is a thermometer; and somewhere in Vermilionville, a like distance to the south-east, there might possibly be found a barometer; but there is no need of either to tell that the air to-day is threescore and ten and will be more before it is less. Before the riders draw near you have noticed that only one is a man and the other a woman. And now you may see that he is sleek and alert, blonde and bland, and the savage within us wants to knock off his silk hat. All the more so for that she is singularly pretty to be met in his sole care. The years count on her brows, it is true, but the way in which they tell of matronhood—and somehow of widowhood too—is a very fair and gentle way. Her dress is plain, but its lines have a grace that is also dignity; and the lines of her face—lines is too hard a word for them—are not those of time, but of will and of care, that have chastened and refined one another. She speaks only now and then. Her companion's speech fills the wide intervals.

"Yesterday morning," he says, "as I came along here a little after sunrise, there was a thin fog lying only two or three feet deep, close to the level ground as far as you could see, hiding the whole prairie, and making it look for all the world like a beautiful lake, with every here and there a green grove standing out of it like a real little island."

She replies that she used to see it so in her younger days. The Acadian accent is in her words. She lifts her black eyes, looks toward Carancro, and is silent.

"You're thinking of the changes," says her escort.

"Yass; 'tis so. Dey got twenty time' many field' like had befo'. Peop' don't raise cattl' no more; raise crop'. Dey say even dat land changin'."

"How changing?"

"I dunno. I dunno if 'tis so. Dey say prairie risin' mo' higher every year. I dunno if 'tis so. I t'ink dat land don't change much; but de peop', yass."

"Still, the changes are mostly good changes," responds the male rider. "'Tisn't the prairie, but the people that are rising. They've got the schoolhouse, and the English language, and a free paid labor system, and the railroads, and painted wagons, and Cincinnati furniture, and sewing-machines, and melodeons, and Horsford's Acid Phosphate; and they've caught the spirit of progress!"

"Yass, 'tis so. Dawn't see nobody seem satisfied—since de army—since de railroad."

"Well, that's right enough; they oughtn't to be satisfied. You're not satisfied, are you? And yet you've never done so well before as you have this season. I wish I could say the same for the 'Album of Universal Information;' but I can't. I tell you that, Madame Beausoleil; I wouldn't tell anybody else."