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she needed neither to titter nor chatter, she could talk. And then, her violin made victory always easy and certain.

Sometimes the company was largely of downtown Creoles; sometimes of uptown people,"Americans"; and often equally of the two sorts, talking French and English in most amusing and pleasing confusion. For the father of the family had lately been made president of a small bank, and was fairly boxing the social compass in search of depositors. Marguerite had not yet discovered that-if we may drag the metaphor ashore - to enter society is not to emerge upon an unbroken tableland, or that she was not on its highest plateau. She noticed the frequency with which she encountered unaccomplished fathers, stupid mothers, rude sons and daughters, and illdistributed personal regard; but she had the common sense not to expect more of society than its nature warrants, guessed rightly that she would find the same thing anywhere else, and could not know that these elements were less mixed with better here than in any other of the city's circles, of whose existence she had not even heard. However:

Society, at its very best, always needs, and at its best or worst always contains, a few superior members who make themselves a blessing by working a constant, tactful redistribution of individuals by their true values, across the unworthy lines upon which society ever tends to stratify. Such a person, a matron, sat with Marguerite one April evening under a Chinese lantern in the wide, curtained veranda of an Esplanade street house whose drawing-room and Spanish garden were filled with company. Marguerite was secretly cast down. This lady had brought her here, having met her but a fortnight before and chosen her at once, in her own private counsels, for social promotion. And Marguerite had played the violin. In her four months' advanced training she had accomplished wonders. Her German professor made the statement, while he warned her against enthusiastic drawing-room flattery. This evening she had gotten much praise and thanks. Yet these had a certain discriminative moderation that was new to her ear, and confirmed to her, not in the pleasantest way, the realization that this company was of higher average intelligence and refinement than any she had met before. She little guessed that the best impression she had ever made she made here to-night.

Of course it was not merely on account of the violin. She had beauty, not only of face and head, but of form and carriage. So that, when she stood with her instrument, turning, as it were, every breath of air into music, and the growing volume of the strains called forth VOL. XXXV.-32.

all her good Acadian strength of arms and hand, she charmed not merely the listening ear, but the eye, the reason, and the imagination in its freest range.

But, indeed, it was not the limitations of her social triumphs themselves that troubled her. Every experience of the evening had helped to show her how much wider the world was than she had dreamed, and had opened new distances on the right, on the left, and far ahead; and nowhere in them all could eye see, or ear hear, aught of that one without whom to go back to old things was misery, and to go on to new was mere weariness. And the dear little mother at home! — worth nine out of any ten of all this crowd-still at home in that old tavern-keeping life, now intolerable to think of, and still writing those yearning letters that bade the daughter not return! No wonder Marguerite's friend had divined her feelings, and drawn her out to the cool retreat under the shadow of the veranda lanterns.

A gentleman joined them, who had "just come," he said. Marguerite's companion and he were old friends. Neither he nor Marguerite heard each other's name, nor could see each other's face more than dimly. He was old enough to be twitted for bachelorhood, and to lay the blame upon an outdoor and out-oftown profession. Such words drew Marguerite's silent but close attention.

The talk turned easily from this to the ease with which the fair sex, as compared with the other, takes on the graces of the drawingroom. "Especially," the two older ones agreed, "if the previous lack is due merely to outward circumstances." But Marguerite was still. Here was a new thought. One who attained all those graces and love's prize also might at last, for love's sake, have to count them but dross, or carry them into retirement, the only trophies of abandoned triumphs. While she thought, the conversation went on.

"Yes," said her friend, replying to the bachelor, "we acquire them more easily; but why? Because most of us think we must. A man may find success in one direction or another, but a woman has got to be a social success or she 's a complete failure. She can't snap her fingers at the drawing-room."

"Ah!" exclaimed Marguerite, "she can if she want!" She felt the strength to rise that moment and go back to Opelousas, if only-and did not see, until her companions laughed straight at her, that the lady had spoken in jest.

"Still," said the bachelor, "the drawingroom is woman's element-realm-rather than man's, whatever the reasons may be. I had a young man with me last winter-"

"I knew it!" thought Marguerite. "— until lately, in fact; he's here in town now,- whom I have tried once or twice to decoy into company in a small experimental way. It's harder than putting a horse into a ship. He seems not to know what social interchange is for."

"Thinks it's for intellectual profit and pleasure!" interrupted the ironical lady.

"No, he just does n't see the use or fun of it. And yet, really, that 's his only deficiency. True, he listens better than he talks-overdoes it; but when a chap has youth, intelligence, native refinement, integrity, and good looks, as far above the mean level as many of our society fellows are below it, it seems to me he ought to be"

"Utilized," suggested the lady, casting her eyes toward Marguerite and withdrawing them as quickly, amused at the earnestness of her attention.

"Yes," said the bachelor, and mused a moment. "He's a talented fellow. It's only a few months ago that he really began life. Now he 's outgrown my service." "Left the nest," said the lady. "Yes, indeed. He has invented "Oh! dear!"

The bachelor was teased. "Ah! come, now; show your usual kindness; he has, really, made a simple, modest agricultural machine that meets a want long felt. Oh! you may laugh; but he laughs last. He has not only a patent for it, but a good sale also, and is looking around for other worlds to conquer."

"And yet spurns society? Ours!" "No, simply develops no affinity for it; would like to, if only to please me; but can't. Doesn't even make intimate companions among men; simply clings to his fond, lone father, and the lone father to him, closer than any pair of twin orphan girls that ever you saw. I don't believe anything in life could divide them." "Ah, don't you trust him! Man proposes, Cupid disposes. A girl will stick to her mother; but a man? Why, the least thing—a pair of blue eyes, a yellow curl -"

The bachelor gayly shook his head, and, leaning over with an air of secrecy, said: "A pair of blue eyes have shot him through and through, and a yellow curl is wound all round him from head to heel, and yet he sticks to his father."

"He can't live," said the lady. Marguerite's hand pressed her arm, and they rose. As the bachelor drew the light curtain of a long window aside, that they might pass in, the light fell upon Marguerite's face. It was entirely new to him. It seemed calm. Yet instantly the question smote him, "What have I done? what have I said?" She passed, and turned

to give a parting bow. The light fell upon him. She was right; it was Claude's friend, the engineer. When he came looking for them a few minutes later, he only caught, by chance, a glimpse of them, clouded in light wraps and passing to their carriage. It was not yet twelve.

Between Marguerite's chamber and that of one of the daughters of the family there was a door that neither one ever fastened. Somewhere downstairs a clock was striking three in the morning, when this door softly opened and the daughter stole into Marguerite's room in her night-robe. With her hair falling about her, her hands unconsciously clasped, her eyes starting, and an outcry of amazement checked just within her open, rounded mouth, she stopped and stood an instant in the brightly lighted chamber.

Marguerite sat on the bedside exactly as she had come from the carriage, save that a white gossamer web had dropped from her head and shoulders and lay coiled about her waist. Her tearless eyes were wide and filled with painful meditation, even when she turned to the alarmed and astonished girl before her. With suppressed exclamations of wonder and pity the girl glided forward, cast her arms about the sitting figure, and pleaded for explanation.

"It is a headache," said Marguerite, kindly but firmly lifting away the entwining arms. "No, no, you can do nothing.-It is a headache. Yes, I will go to bed presently; you go to yours.- No, no

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The night-robed girl looked for a moment more into Marguerite's eyes, then sank to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Marguerite laid her hands upon the bowed head and looked down with dry eyes. "No," she presently said again, "'t is a headache. Go back to your bed.- No, there is nothing to tell; only I have been very, very foolish and very, very selfish, and I am going home tomorrow. Good-night."

The door closed softly between the two. Then Marguerite sank slowly back upon the bed, closed her eyes, and, rocking her head from side to side, said again and again, in moans that scarcely left the lips:

"My mother! my mother! Take me back! Oh! take me back, my mother! my mother!"

At length she arose, put off her attire, lay down to rest, and, even while she was charging sleep with being a thousand leagues away,- slept.

When she awoke, the wide, bright morning filled all the room. Had some sound wakened her? Yes, a soft tapping came again upon her door. She lay still. It sounded once more. For all its softness it seemed nervous and eager. A low voice came with it:

"Marguerite!"

She sprang from her pillow." Yes!"
While she answered, it came again:
"Marguerite!"

With a low cry she cast away the bed-coverings, threw back the white mosquito-curtain and the dark masses of her hair and started up, lifted and opened her arms, cried again, but with joy, "My mother! my mother!" and clasped Zoséphine to her bosom.

VIII.

THE SHAKING PRAIRIE.

MANIFESTLY it was a generous overstatement for Claude's professional friend to say that Claude had outgrown his service. It was true only that by and by there had come a juncture in his affairs where he could not, without injustice to others, make a place for Claude which he could advise Claude to accept, and they had parted, with the mutual hope that the separation would be transient. But the surveyor could not but say to himself that such incidents, happening while we are still young, are apt to be turning-points in our lives, if our lives are going to have direction and movement of their own at all. St. Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woolen sack that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure's above one green mound in the church-yard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster's care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer's party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from following Claude. Father and son went one way, and the camp another.

I must confess to being somewhat vague as to just where they were. I should have to speak from memory, and I must not make another slip in topography. The changes men have made in southern Louisiana these last few years are great. I say nothing again of the vast widths of prairie stripped of their herds and turned into corn and cane fields: when I came, a few months ago, to that station on Morgan's Louisiana and Texas railroad where Claude first went aboard a railway train, somebody had actually moved the bayou, the swamp, and the prairie apart!

However, the exact whereabouts of the St. Pierres is not important to us. Mr. Tarbox, when, in search of the camp, he crossed the Teche at St. Martinville, expected to find it somewhere north-eastward, between the stream

and Atchafalaya. But at the Atchafalaya he found that the work in that region had been finished three days before and that the party had been that long gone to take part in a new work down in the prairies tremblantes of Terrebonne parish. The Louisiana Land Reclamation Company - I think that was the name of the concern projecting the scheme. This was back in early February, you note.

Thither Mr. Tarbox followed. The "Album of Universal Information" went along and "did well." It made his progress rather slow, of course; but one of Mr. Tarbox's many maxims was, never to make one day pay for another when it could be made to pay for itself, and during this season—this Louisiana Campaign, as he called it — he had developed a new art,making each day pay for itself several times over.

"Many of these people," he said,- but said it solely and silently to himself,-" are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even when they 're not, they 're out of the current, as it were; they have n't headway; and so they never—or seldom ever-see any way to make money except somehow in connection with the plantations. There's no end of chances here to a man that 's got money, sense, and nerve to use it." He wrote that to Zoséphine; but she wrote no answer. A day rarely passed that he did not find some man making needless loss through ignorance or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his sharper wit and garner the neglected harvest. Or seeing some unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at what expense, to bring it there, and brought it.

"Give me the gains other men pass by," he said, "and I'll be satisfied. The saying is, Buy wisdom'; but I sell mine. I like to sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an adventure. And if there's any. thing I love, it 's an adventure with money in it! But even that is n't my chief pleasure; my chief pleasure 's the study of human nature.

“The proper study of mankind is man.

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.'" This spoiling of Assyrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr. Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but "is n't that what time is for?" he would say to those he had been dealing with, as he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would respond, "Yes, that's so."

And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were thinking that at least he might know it was his treat.

Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne bayou far down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party that Claude was not with him.

"He didn't leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he had n't decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them to know just how to move."

The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated, empearled free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to find out. So he added, "I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose you stay with me until then." And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox quickly jumped at the proposition. No letter came. But when the twenty-four hours had passed, the surveyor had taken that same generous - not to say credulous-liking for Mr. Tarbox that we have seen him show for St. Pierre and for Claude. He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward through a series of short canals that span the shaking prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across prairie and at length, leaving Lake Cataouaché on the left, through cypress swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans. He would have pressed Mr. Tarbox to bear him company; but before he could ask twice Mr. Tarbox had consented. They went in a cat-rigged skiff, with a stalwart negro rowing or towing whenever the sail was not the best.

"It's all of sixty miles," said the engineer; "but if the wind does n't change or drop we can sleep to-night in Achille's hut, send this man and skiff back, and make Achille, with his skiff, put us on board the Louisiana avenue ferry-launch to-morrow afternoon."

"Who is Achille ?"

"Achille ? Oh! he's merely 'Cajun pothunter living on a shell bank at the edge of Lake Cataouaché- with an Indian wife. Used to live somewhere on Bayou des Allemands, but last year something or other scared him away from there. He's odd-seems to be a sort of self-made outcast. I don't suppose he's ever done anybody any harm; but he just seems to be one of that kind that can't bear to even try to keep up with the rest of humanity; the sort of man swamps and shaking prairies were specially made for, you know. He's living on a bank of fossil shells now, thousands of barrels of them,- that he knows would bring him a little fortune if only he

could command the intelligence and the courage to market them in New Orleans. There's a chance for some bright man who is n't already too busy. Why did n't I think to mention it to Claude? But then neither he nor his father have got the commercial knowledge they would need. Now" The speaker suddenly paused and, as the two men sat close beside each other under an umbrella in the stern of the skiff, looked into Mr. Tarbox's pale blue eyes, and smiled, and smiled. "I'm here," said Mr. Tarbox.

"Yes," responded the other, "and I 've just made out why! And you 're right, Tarbox; you and Claude, with or without his father, will make a strong team. You've got no business to be canvassing books, you"

"It's my line," said the canvasser, smiling fondly and pushing his hat back,- it was wonderful how he kept that hat smooth,—" and I'm the head of the line

"A voice replied far up the height,
Excelsior!

"I was acquainted with Mr. Longfellow." "Tarbox," persisted the engineer, driving away his own smile, "you know what you are; you are a born contractor! You've found it out, and "- smiling again—" that's why you 're looking for Claude."

"Where is he?" asked Mr. Tarbox.

"Well, I told you the truth when I said I did n't know; but I have n't a doubt he 's in Vermillionville."

"Neither have I," said the book-agent; "and if I had, I would n't give it room. If I knew he was in New Jersey, still I 'd think he was in Vermillionville, and go there looking for him. And wherefore? For occult reasons."

The two men looked at each other smilingly in the eye, and the boat glided on.

The wind favored them. With only now and then the cordelle, and still more rarely the oars, they moved all day across the lands and waters that were once the fastnesses of the Baratarian pirates. The engineer made his desired observations without appreciable delays, and at night they slept under Achille's thatch of rushes.

As the two travelers stood alone for a moment next morning, the engineer said:

"You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter."

"It's my natural instinct," replied Mr. Tarbox. "The study of human nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural—and easier. The pothunter is a study; you 're right."

"But he reciprocates," said the engineer; "he studies you.”

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