lness. A smile, starting
from the quiet elder sister, went around the group, directed against the
abstracted and somewhat rueful countenance of Joseph, whereat he turned
with a better face and said that what the Creator had pronounced very
good they could hardly feel free to condemn. The old father was still
more stout of heart.

"These mosquitoes, children, are thought by some to keep the air pure,"
he said.

"Better keep out of it after sunset," put in the captain.

After that day and night, the prospect grew less repellent. A gradually
matured conviction that New Orleans would not be found standing on
stilts in the quagmire enabled the eye to become educated to a better
appreciation of the solemn landscape. Nor was the landscape always
solemn. There were long openings, now and then, to right and left, of
emerald-green savannah, with the dazzling blue of the Gulf far beyond,
waving a thousand white-handed good-byes as the funereal swamps slowly
shut out again the horizon. How sweet the soft breezes off the moist
prairies! How weird, how very near, the crimson and green and black and
yellow sunsets! How dream-like the land and the great, whispering river!
The profound stillness and breath reminded the old German, so he said,
of that early time when the evenings and mornings were the first days of
the half-built world. The barking of a dog in Fort Plaquemines seemed to
come before its turn in the panorama of creation--before the earth was
ready for the dog's master.

But he was assured that to live in those swamps was not entirely
impossible to man--"if one may call a negro a man." Runaway slaves were
not so rare in them as one--a lost hunter, for example--might wish. His
informant was a new passenger, taken aboard at the fort. He
spoke English.

"Yes, sir! Didn' I had to run from Bras-Coupe in de haidge of de swamp
be'ine de 'abitation of my cousin Honore, one time? You can hask 'oo you
like!" (A Creole always provides against incredulity.) At this point he
digressed a moment: "You know my cousin, Honore Grandissime, w'at give
two hund' fifty dolla' to de 'ospill laz mont'? An' juz because my
cousin Honore give it, somebody helse give de semm. Fo' w'y don't he
give his nemm?"

The reason (which this person did not know) was that the second donor
was the first one over again, resolved that the little unknown Monk
should not know whom she had baffled.

"Who was Bras-Coupe?" the good German asked in French.

Th