za. We will keep shop for you. Stay as long as you like
and come home in any condition you think best." And Joseph, tormented
into this course, put on his hat and went out.

"Hard to move as a cow in the moonlight," continued Doctor Keene, "and
knows just about as much of the world. He wasn't aware, until I told him
to-day, that there are two Honore Grandissimes." [Laughter.]

"Why did you tell him?"

"I didn't give him anything but the bare fact. I want to see how long it
will take him to find out the rest."

The Place d'Armes offered amusement to every one else rather than to the
immigrant. The family relation, the most noticeable feature of its'
well-pleased groups, was to him too painful a reminder of his late
losses, and, after an honest endeavor to flutter out of the inner
twilight of himself into the outer glare of a moving world, he had given
up the effort and had passed beyond the square and seated himself upon a
rude bench which encircled the trunk of a willow on the levee.

The negress, who, resting near by with a tray of cakes before her, has
been for some time contemplating the three-quarter face of her
unconscious neighbor, drops her head at last with a small, Ethiopian,
feminine laugh. It is a self-confession that, pleasant as the study of
his countenance is, to resolve that study into knowledge is beyond her
powers; and very pardonably so it is, she being but a _marchande des
gateaux_ (an itinerant cake-vender), and he, she concludes, a man of
parts. There is a purpose, too, as well as an admission, in the laugh.
She would like to engage him in conversation. But he does not notice.
Little supposing he is the object of even a cake-merchant's attention,
he is lost in idle meditation.

One would guess his age to be as much as twenty-six. His face is
beardless, of course, like almost everybody's around him, and of a
German kind of seriousness. A certain diffidence in his look may tend to
render him unattractive to careless eyes, the more so since he has a
slight appearance of self-neglect. On a second glance, his refinement
shows out more distinctly, and one also sees that he is not shabby. The
little that seems lacking is woman's care, the brush of attentive
fingers here and there, the turning of a fold in the high-collared coat,
and a mere touch on the neckerchief and shirt-frill. He has a decidedly
good forehead. His blue eyes, while they are both strong and modest, are
noticeable, too, as betraying