ready, pulling every thing to pieces, over and over again, just for the sake of working for her, my little wife. Oh you may answer for it, Chevalier, the husband and the home were all ready when that ship arrived.

"But it is one thing to fill your pipe and put it in your mouth, and another thing to smoke it. The ship came; you may imagine if I was there among the first when it landed. You should have seen us young men looking for our wives. So clean, so fresh, with our best clothes and our church manners. St. Peter himself could have been fooled by the appearance of the very worst one of the lot.

"I do not know, Monsieur, but it seems to me that the young girls are no longer so beautiful as they used to be, and this was the handsomest shipment ever sent to Louisiana-owing to the Commandant's always writing to the government at home: 'Less catechism, my lord, and more good looks! What do you take my Canadians for ?'

"And so the government took more pains in the selection, and there came, each one, a perfect flower. But you think we saw one of them! Hum! The Commandant was there, the officers of council were there, priests were there, gentlemen were there at the landing; all had the advantage over us, and the brave looks got up to greet our ladies began to change to scowls, and it would not have been hard for St. Peter then to tell who was who. But, the good sisters be thanked, the fine people saw no more than we did. In their long cloaks, and closed hoods, and veils over their hoods, they might have been Africans for all we knew. They were hurried away to the nuns' quarters, and three days were given to rest.

Those three days, it was like being in a desert, with nothing to see and nothing to hear. The city felt like a church, and whatever I did, I felt as if I were at mass. I think that is the way the priests must feel all the time.

"Then the Commandant sent us word. We went to confession and took the sacraments early in the morning, and from the church, ran to the hotel of the Commandant. The young girls, they had been to confession and communion in the nuns' chapel, they arrived under charge of the two sisters who brought them from France.

"The Sieur de Bienville had, of course, seen them, and the officers of the council, and no doubt many of the fine young gentlemen in New Orleans, who had money to procure the

gratification of their curiosity. And I had gone to the Commandant myself-not to see the young girls, nor to ask any privileges, only to tell him to see that the little wife sent me by the Good Man up there should come to me and not go to any one else, ‘for if she goes to any one else, Monsieur le Commandant,' I said, 'she goes to a corpse, were it the president of the council himself,' which was a way of talking, for the president of the council was a married man; but there were others in authority not married, and I thought it only honest to let him know my plans.

"Well, they came into the room and ranged themselves all on one side; we ranged ourselves on the other, face to face, and then I raised my eyes, I had not looked before. All in a row; dressed in brown gowns, with black silk aprons and white kerchiefs and white caps, with a bundle of clothes at the feet of each one; all well-grown, handsome girls; as Monsieur the Minister had written, the king of France himself could not have had a finer lot to choose from.

"The notary called over the names of the men so fast, we hardly had time to say, 'Here,' before he had gone on to another. One of the sisters answered for the girls, making a mark on the paper for every one called. At the end she asked for a receipt; and the Commandant was going to make the distribution, but before he could open his lips, a clear voice, it was like the voice of an angel, Mon Chevalier, came out of the line of girls, and the words were, 'Monsieur le Commandant, I choose this one!' Such a laugh, for it was not they who were to choose, but we. While they were laughing I felt my hand taken, for I was the man she had chosen. And I was so sure that she was the little wife who had been planted and raised for me that I did not look at the others. I did not even look at her; I raised my eyes to the Monsieur de Bienville, and said while I held fast the little hand in mine, And I choose her, Monsieur le Commandant.' I looked at him straight in the eyes, and he gave a nod. 'What name? What name?' As quick as we could answer, the notary wrote them down, ‘Louis Belisaire, Marie Marguerite Girard.' And then as soon as the procès-verbal was finished, we all went to the church where the marriage ceremony was performed.

"But little wife was not to be my wife, mon garçon; the Good Man up there had not

sent me a wife, only a poor girl in misfortune, whom they sent to me because she prayed and prayed during the voyage, 'Oh my God! let my eyes rest on an honest man who will save and deliver me!' And all on the voyage, when I was praying in my way at home, getting the little cabin in order, she was praying that, and God inspired her what to do. And, Monsieur, she selected well. God sent her to the right address. It might have been that dog Louis, called Le Loup, or that drunkard Martinet.

"I abandoned her that night according to her directions. I would rather have killed myself-one little shot through the head, but I did not tell her so. It was not for me to do what I wanted but what she wanted.

"She was so beautiful, Monsieur, that the most beautiful girls since have appeared to me like witches; and she carried herself like the wife of a governor-general; but she was thin, as thin as a humming bird in winter, and when I looked in her face, I saw all the suffering she had had on the vessel, not knowing whether God had heard her prayer. For she could not go to the saints, she said, it was too important. She went to the King over them all. I had found out myself that God is more apt to consider you, if you go straight to Him.

"And if He had not heard her prayer, Monsieur, heaven, in my opinion, would have been proved a no better place than purgatory.

"I showed every thing in the cabin. I put her in the chair I had made for her, for, in truth, she was ill and trembling beyond power to stand. I took my gun, my pouches, and my deer-skin cap-and I was passing out without a word, and she called me by my name, 'Louis!' I turned, she was holding her hand toward me. I knelt down before her, and took the hand, but dropped it-my tears would have fallen on it—but she caught my hand, and kissed it, as I wanted to kiss hers. God bless you!' she said; and that was all.

"I left my cabin and walked. When I came to myself, I was on the shores of the great ocean to the west of us. I turned then and walked back, and when I reached the city again, they said it was ten years since I leftand, mon garçon, in walking back, I thought, maybe the good One will let me see her again; and whenever I thought that, I would break my walk and run. But no; she had been dead

five years ;-of yellow fever, in an epidemic, for she became a sister and nursed the sick. "That was a curious thing that God did, wasn't it, Mon Chevalier?"

CHAPTER IX.

MADAME ODALISE.

As Didon and the neighbors said, God alone knew how good Madame Odalise was, as He alone can discover the germ of goodness, as hidden sometimes under the practices of religion, as under those of evil. It was supposed that her ambition was to become a saint; to have miracles performed on her tomb, and to be canonized. Whether her aspirations were based on real or imitation virtues, the last day alone will reveal; what were visible to her admirers were substantial enough to warrant their oft-repeated assertion, that if her soul carried out after death but a tithe of what her body performed in life, she would be canonized beyond a doubt. The Spanish government allowed no heretics for her to practice her zeal on, and as she allowed herself to know only the most pious, her field of conversion was restricted; but she was accustomed to say: "Every human body however virtuous and orthodox, holds, in the sight of the Almighty, still a heretic and a sinner." And so her inquisition, so to speak, was kept busy with herself and Didon.

She held every species of sin in abhorrence. There were absolutely no venials for her; all were mortal and damnatory, and supremely so, those gentle failings for which her sex and former beauty should have cried mercy. In these cases she had the inflexibility not of the theorist but of the convert. The softening moments of memory, and memory is the last thing in a woman that ceases to be feminine, merely excited her to greater rigors, and she confessed and did penance for being a woman, as an assassin might do for being an assassin. In purity itself she could detect a soilure, and in her eyes the whitest napkin held defilement unless laundered by the Church. "The fires of hell," she would say,

were kept lighted, burning the refuse of Mother Church," meaning those whose natural vileness excluded them from the sanctuary, and the refuse comprised not only heretics and recalcitrant Romanists, but even those luke-warm natures who did not burn as she did, with a living fire of consuming passion for devotion.

By the interposition of heaven in her be half in a certain duel, she had been relieved from a marriage, which, if prolonged, might have interfered with the culture of her soul, as matrimony does too often with the soulculture of women. Widowhood had been a grief only until she aspired to become a saint, and then, alas! her vision began to change, and she began to see the defunct husband with colder and colder eyes, until her reminiscential glances at him became the passionless look of a sister; and by comparison with her, he grew worse and worse in the retrospect as she grew better.

If the colony had not been transferred from France to Spain, Madame Odalise might not have been considered a saint, save by that complimentary canonization which a gallant world has always conferred upon a pretty widow. Father Dagobert, as history knows, was not one who believed in a crown of thorns, as a parure for the feminine head. If flowers of an unbecoming hue were not allowable instead, he thought that the prickles might be pared off, to at least comfortable endurance, for the fragile sinner.

But when Spain entered upon her royal functions in Louisiana, there was an inventory taken of the morals, as well as other stores left by the French. An allusion is all that is necessary to the celebrated report rendered by Father Cirillo to Don Santiago Hechevarria, Bishop of Cuba, a report that the sinners qualified as a scandal, but in which would-be saints recognized a warning. Madame Odalise, in fright, took her morals instantly from under the lax régime of the French and gave them in charge of the Spanish capuchins, the efficacy of whose methods of dealing with carnal nature she lived to advertize. No people on earth are required to be so circumspect in their society as saints; hence Madame Odalise's contended estrangement from so notorious a sinner as her brother, and after his departure, her mind resignedly contemplated consigning him and his memory to a complementary niche in her past, similar to that filled by her husband. As her Spanish priest did not speak of him to her, as the imaged saints on her walls did not recall him, as he was not personally mentioned in her prayer book, she had but to impose her wishes upon Didon, to progress uninterruptedly in the rôle she had selected to fill. She had begun already with, "I trust he will find grace! and may the

blessed saints forgive his short-comings as I do; I pray for him." And warmly pressing the hands of her devotees, for she really had devotees already, "Pray you for him." "It is a cross!" "The blessed Virgin knows what is best for me!" An aphorism she made which even the priests repeated admiringly, "When the world, when one's enemies forbear, the good Lord sends our nearest and dearest to throw thorns under our feet"; and another, "One learns patience and resignation on family crosses "; and yet another, "I welcome crucifixion even at the hands of a brother or a husband; as He was crucified for me, what more grateful sight to Him than to see me crucified for Him!" She told her friends, "I pray for crucifixion as some pray for bread, for is not suffering the bread of heavenly life?"

As these sentiments were not prevalent in the colony, even at that day, it was not surprising that Madame Odalise was looked upon with somewhat of the awe with which one looks upon the inexplicable.

What Madame Odalise practiced publicly, that practiced Didon also. From external observation, she was as good a Christian as any made by the Spaniards, from the unworked and neglected dough left over by the French, and there seemed to be no reason except illogical discrimination of color why she alone and not her mistress also, should be subjected to the daily and hourly persecutions of evil spirits.

The negress carried amulets around her neck and charms in her pocket, and offered herself as a patient to every voodoo conjurer she could hear of, in the commendable hope of assisting the Christian God against the African devil in her; innocently enough, being thus led into nocturnal sorties, and contraband reception of visitors, and deceptions of all kinds, with affirmations of falsehoods and denials of truth to her mistress, and such consequent fear of earthly punishment as made the terrors of eternity light in comparison with the possible ones of the current day. How many times had she not, fresh from catechism and a homily on the cardinal virtues, hastened to a secret corner of the yard to try her hand at some new "grigri" incantations, or with the facile music of a Latin prayer on her lips, dropped into the forbidden-the unrepeatable words of a voodoo song?

How much did the mistress suspect? How

much of the slave's real nature lay hidden in the darkness under that opaque black skin? Absolutely nothing. At least so thought Madame Odalise; not indeed from confidence in the integrity of the regenerated slave's nature, but from her trust in the infallibility of her regenerative methods.

"It is impossible for an ulcer of sin to exist under the curing remedies of the church," was one of her axioms. In her hours of temptation, that is if she ever had temptation, one suspects her confessions of such being merely the working of her vast humility in her, she would fly to the church, the one place, as she told Didon, sacred from Satan. And Didon, with whom temptation was not a simulation but a sharp reality, was made also to seek the sanctuary, at any hour of the day, when her barriers of virtue seemed threatened; but thechurch held no immunity for her from the evil one-which she did not confess to her mistress, having found out in which direction the unpardonable blasphemy lay. On the contrary, it was while going to church, and performing devotions in it, and returning from it, that her deviations from rectitude occurred or were inspired by meeting people, talking to them, hearing the news, and imparting it, in short, the increasing her knowledge and her opportunities of trespasses.

CHAPTER X.

ΤΙΝΤΑ.

SUMMER and winter sped. With the spring old Louis Belisaire conducted his Creoles back to the Indian village on the bank of the Arkansas where their pirogue had been kept in safety for them. The water, which, according to Belisaire, was to carry them home on its downward flood with barely a stroke of the paddle, was at its full.

The old man, as usual, was as poor in pocket as when he started out. Not so the others. The spirit of trade and their own hunting skill, had multiplied their pack of paltry trumpery into such magazines of beaver, buffalo, and bear skins and bears' oil and boucaned beef, and occasional nuggets of gold that the hunters tossed restlessly around their camp-fires at night, and the peaceful slumber of wholesome fatigue was visited by the feverish dreams of the overwealthy, and painful calculations, by minds not used to calculating gross results, were substituted for innocent bavardage, as each one sought to transpose his wealth into its equivalent of city pleasure. "To the city! to the city!" The Canadians themselves could not have been more imperious, more rebelliously impatient; nor could they have sung more rollicking songs, nor assumed more prospectively defiant airs; and the stories which the Creoles were preparing to grace their reappearance in the cabarets were more extravagant than the daring of even coureurs de bois.

But the one pirogue which had borne their empty pockets and exhausted energies so easily, even against the up-stream current, was inadequate, to a fractional nothing, before the present accumulations of booty and fattened strength. Additional means of transportation had to be procured, but no boats

"Whom do you go to church to meet? I meet no one when I go to church but the blessed Host."

flowable country; they must be made,-pirogues and a flat-boat, with all the haste that eager, prospective spendthrifts could throw into the task; by the time they had found

It was as much as to say to Didon, although the inference came from Zombi:

"Do talk as you please-I neither see nor hear any thing."

outs," and made the timber for the flat-boat, the water, a short rise, began to fall; by the time the task was completed, bars and snags, emerging from their harmless depths into hidden perils blocked the river's mouth. The autumn rise had to be waited for.

The spirits of the men sank with the river,

during which, like the river, they showed uncanny fillings in of their character bed. Discontent, murmurings, rebellious looks, and insolent bearing, with robbery, desertion, bloodshed, even assassination peeping from sullen eyes. Belisaire and the Chevalier, commandants, army, sentinels, spies, all in two persons, frustrated plans and anticipated designs, stood on watch and guard night and day against the mutinous passions of their companions and dependants, as they would all have stood together against an army of revengeful assailants-stemming the opportunity for evil.

It might have been of another ending with different Indians, but the village belonged to the Kappas, the "gentle Kappas," as the early pioneers learned and loved to call them; civilized and refined in their own lines, simple, brave, handsome, and true beyond their own times. The freedom of wigwam, camp-fire, hunting parties, feasts, and primitive pastimes, was extended over the newly enforced sojourn of their unwilling guests, and it was only natures who could be disappointed into churlishness and sedition, to whom the simple hospitality could have appeared in the light of an infliction and a grievance. It was more a family than a tribe, over whom a patriarch presided with parental authority and solicitude. His age antedated the colonization of the French on the Gulf, and his religion was the pure nature worship of the unconverted Indian; and the missionaries had never found lodgment among them except as guests.

"My son," he said to the first priest who accosted him, "did the Great Spirit wait for you to come and lead him to me as a mother leads a little child? The Great Spirit himself came to me and my fathers, as he came to you and your fathers. The Great Spirit is the same everywhere, as the sun is the same everywhere; but when it shines on different lands it calls out different trees and animals. The Great Spirit shined on our land and he called up the red men. He shined on your land over the water and he called out the pale-faces."

She sat apart—she was always apart from them all, except the old chief, her fosterfather-the silent, shy, flitting little alien, the cast-off booty of some passing marauding band of savages, flying red-handed from a midnight carnage.

"I picked her up in the forest, where she had fallen or been torn from a mother's arms, as I would pick up a featherless bird, dropped or cast out of the nest. The trembling, naked bird grows into redbreast, blackbird, or jay-the trembling, crying baby grew into likeness of the pale-faces of blood and gold, like the men from the far west, or from the east, in the country of the Apalachees; why did she not grow also into a child of the Great Spirit of the pale-faces; why does she not ask for the God of the black gowns? She asks for them not; she asks not for the land of the pale-faces, she asks not for a palefaced father, she asks only for me-for it is love that makes the father, as it is love that makes the Great Spirit"--and as he pointed to this foundling, so he could have pointed to other foundlings,-Natchez, Tensas, Houlas, Bayougoulas, who also had come into the tribe, as children by adoption.

The river began to rise again, and with it rose the spirits, morals, and good sense of the men. Their daily elevation could be measured with the same guage that bore the record of the water when the pirogues rode flush with the bank; the loading commenced, the peltry, the feathers, dried beef, and the "fawns," the skins of animals filled with oil, grotesque effigies, like bloated corpses. So many pots of oil to a fawn, so many hours pleasure to a pot, so many fawns to a man-with boisterous alacrity the regenerating brigands worked, counting aloud as they stowed away in frolic their share of each commodity. From daylight to noon, and it was done; to the breaking up of the camp, and the carrying aboard provisions, blankets, pots, and ammunition. The war

"Why does not the Great Spirit of the pale-faces speak to her? Why does he leave her to the Great Spirit of the red man? No, he gives her to the Great Spirit of the red

ture, the children gamboling under foot hindered, the squaws seated in groups on the bank, laughing and talking, calling to the children, and joking with the men added that vividness of interest to the work which