Jones
about with the invincible persistence of a Menard.

Young Pierre had been allowed to ride into the capital this thronging
day under charge of his father's body-servant and Jean Lozier. The
body-servant he sent out of his way with the ponies. Jean Lozier tramped
at his young seignior's heels, glad of some duty which would excuse him
to his conscience.

This was the peasant lad's first taste of Kaskaskia. He could hardly
believe he was there. The rapture of it at first shook him like a palsy.
He had risen while the whole peninsula was yet a network of dew, and the
Mississippi's sheet, reflecting the dawn, threw silver in his eyes. All
thoughts of his grandfather he put resolutely out of his mind; and such
thoughts troubled him little, indeed, while that sea of humanity dashed
around him. The crash of martial music stirred the man in him. And when
he saw the governor's carriage and the magnates of the Territory,
heading the long procession; the festooned galleries, on which sat
girls dressed in white, like angels, sending their slaves out with
baskets of flowers to strew in the way; when he saw floating tableaux of
men and scenes in the early history of the Territory,--heroes whose
exploits he knew by heart; and when he heard the shouting which seemed
to fill the rivers from bluff to bluff, he was willing to wade through
purgatory to pay for such a day.

Traffic moved with unusual force. It was the custom for outdwelling men
who had something to sell or to trade to reserve it until they came to a
convention in Kasky, when they were certain to meet the best buyers. All
the up-river towns sent lines of vehicles and fleets of boats to the
capital. Kickapoo, Pottawatomie, and Kaskaskia Indians were there to see
the white-man council, scattered immovably along the streets, their
copper faces glistening in the sun, the buckskin fringes on their
leggins scarcely stirring as the hours crept by. Squaws stood in the
full heat, erect and silent, in yellow or dark red garments woven of
silky buffalo wool, and seamed with roebuck sinews. Few of them had
taken to civilized finery. Their barbaric and simple splendor was a
rebuke to poor white women.

Many ease-loving old Frenchmen denied themselves the pleasure of
following the day's pageant from point to point, and chose the best of
the vacant seats fronting the empty platform in the common meadow. There
they waited for speech-making to begin, smoking New Orleans tobacco, and