bin, the cherry-tree, a
glimpse of the raw, wild background and a sharp portrait-group of Pere
Beret, Alice, and Jean the hunchback. To compare it with a photograph
of the same spot now would give a perfect impression of the historic
atmosphere, color and conditions which cannot be set in words. But we
must not belittle the power of verbal description. What if a thoroughly
trained newspaper reporter had been given the freedom of old Vincennes
on the Wabash during the first week of June, 1778, and we now had his
printed story! What a supplement to the photographer's pictures! Well,
we have neither photographs nor graphic report; yet there they are
before us, the gowned and straw-capped priest, the fresh-faced,
coarsely-clad and vigorous girl, the grotesque little hunchback, all
just as real as life itself. Each of us can see them, even with closed
eyes. Led by that wonderful guide, Imagination, we step back a century
and more to look over a scene at once strangely attractive and
unspeakably forlorn.

What was it that drew people away from the old countries, from the
cities, the villages and the vineyards of beautiful France, for
example, to dwell in the wilderness, amid wild beasts and wilder savage
Indians, with a rude cabin for a home and the exposures and hardships
of pioneer life for their daily experience?

Men like Gaspard Roussillon are of a distinct stamp. Take him as he
was. Born in France, on the banks of the Rhone near Avignon, he came as
a youth to Canada, whence he drifted on the tide of adventure this way
and that, until at last he found himself, with a wife, at Post
Vincennes, that lonely picket of religion and trade, which was to
become the center of civilizing energy for the great Northwestern
Territory. M. Roussillon had no children of his own; so his kind heart
opened freely to two fatherless and motherless waifs. These were Alice,
now called Alice Roussillon, and the hunchback, Jean. The former was
twelve years old, when he adopted her, a child of Protestant parents,
while Jean had been taken, when a mere babe, after his parents had been
killed and scalped by Indians. Madame Roussillon, a professed invalid,
whose appetite never failed and whose motherly kindness expressed
itself most often through strains of monotonous falsetto scolding, was
a woman of little education and no refinement; while her husband clung
tenaciously to his love of books, especially to the romances most in
vogue when he took l