ing remnant of an old and curiously gnarled cherry
tree, known as the Roussillon tree, le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon,
as the French inhabitants called it, which as long as it lived bore
fruit remarkable for richness of flavor and peculiar dark ruby depth of
color. The exact spot where this noble old seedling from la belle
France flourished, declined, and died cannot be certainly pointed out;
for in the rapid and happy growth of Vincennes many land-marks once
notable, among them le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, have been
destroyed and the spots where they stood, once familiar to every eye in
old Vincennes, are now lost in the pleasant confusion of the new town.

The security of certain land titles may have largely depended upon the
disappearance of old, fixed objects here and there. Early records were
loosely kept, indeed, scarcely kept at all; many were destroyed by
designing land speculators, while those most carefully preserved often
failed to give even a shadowy trace of the actual boundaries of the
estates held thereby; so that the position of a house or tree not
infrequently settled an important question of property rights left open
by a primitive deed. At all events the Roussillon cherry tree
disappeared long ago, nobody living knows how, and with it also
vanished, quite as mysteriously, all traces of the once important
Roussillon estate. Not a record of the name even can be found, it is
said, in church or county books.

The old, twisted, gum-embossed cherry tree survived every other
distinguishing feature of what was once the most picturesque and
romantic place in Vincennes. Just north of it stood, in the early
French days, a low, rambling cabin surrounded by rude verandas
overgrown with grapevines. This was the Roussillon place, the most
pretentious home in all the Wabash country. Its owner was Gaspard
Roussillon, a successful trader with the Indians. He was rich, for the
time and the place, influential to a degree, a man of some education,
who had brought with him to the wilderness a bundle of books and a
taste for reading.

From faded letters and dimly remembered talk of those who once clung
fondly to the legends and traditions of old Vincennes, it is drawn that
the Roussillon cherry tree stood not very far away from the present
site of the Catholic church, on a slight swell of ground overlooking a
wide marshy flat and the silver current of the Wabash. If the tree grew
there, then there too stood th