heophile
Chapdelaine, was born in this old quarter, in such a street. Royal?"

"Yes. Nearly opposite the ladies' entrance of that Hotel St. Louis now
perishing."

"Except its dome. I hear there's a movement----

"Yes, to save that. I hope 'twill succeed. To me that old dome is a
monument of those two men."

"But if it comes down the home remains, opposite, where both were born,
were they not?"

"Yes. Yet I'd rather the dome. We Creoles, you know, are called very
conservative."

"Yet no race is more radical than the French."

"True. And we Chapdelaines have always been radical. _Grandpere_ was,
though a slaveholder."

"Oh, none of _my_ ancestors justified slavery, yet as planters they had
to own negroes."

"But the Chapdelaines were not planters. They were agents of ships.
Fifty times on one page in the old _Picayune_, or in _L'Abeille_--'For
freight or passage apply to the master on board or to T. Chapdelaine &
Son, agents.' Even then there were two Theophiles, and grandpapa was
the son. They were wholesale agents also for French exporters of
artistic china, porcelain, glass, bronze. Twice they furnished the
hotel with everything of that kind; when it first opened, and when it
changed hands. That's how they came to hold stock in it. Grandpapa,
outdoor man of the firm, was every day in the rotunda, under that dome."

"Yes," Chester said, "it was a kind of Rialto, I know. They called it
the 'Exchange,' as earlier they had called Maspero's."

"You love our small antiquities. So do I. Well, grandpapa did much
business there, both of French goods and of ships; and because the
hotel was the favorite of the sugar-planters its rotunda was one of the
principal places for slave auctions."

"Yes, they were, I know, almost daily. The old slave-block is shown
there yet, if genuine."

"Ah, genuine or not, what difference? From one that _was_ there
_grandpere_ bought many slaves. He and his father speculated in them."

"Why! How strange! The son? _your_ grandfather? the radical, who
married--'Maud'?"

"Yes, the last slave he bought was for her."

"Why, why, why! He couldn't have met her be'--well--before the year of
Lincoln's election."

"No, let me tell you. You remember 'Sidney'?"

"'Maud's' black maid? my uncle's Euonymus? Yes."

"Well, when she came to Maud, at Maud's home, in the North, she was
still in agony about Mingo, who'd been recaptured. So Maud wrote
South, to her aunt,