and, finally, a long letter telling its writer's own short story--a story
so tragic and so sad that I can only say pass it, if you will. It stands
first because it antedates the rest. As you will see, its time is
something more than a hundred years ago. The writing was very difficult to
read, owing entirely to the badness--mainly the softness--of the paper. I
have tried in vain to find exactly where Fort Latourette was situated. It
may have had but a momentary existence in Galvez's campaign against the
English. All along the Gulf shore the sites and remains of the small forts
once held by the Spaniards are known traditionally and indiscriminately as
"Spanish Fort." When John Law,--author of that famed Mississippi Bubble,
which was in Paris what the South Sea Bubble was in London,--failed in his
efforts at colonization on the Arkansas, his Arkansas settlers came down
the Mississippi to within some sixty miles of New Orleans and established
themselves in a colony at first called the _Cote Allemande_ (German
Coast), and later, owing to its prosperity, the _Cote d'Or_, or Golden
Coast. Thus the banks of the Mississippi became known on the Rhine, a
goodly part of our Louisiana Creoles received a German tincture, and the
father and the aunt of Suzanne and Francoise were not the only Alsatians
we shall meet in these wild stories of wild times in Louisiana.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Name of the parish, or county.--Translator.
[2] Royalist refugees of '93.--TRANSLATOR.

THE YOUNG AUNT WITH WHITE HAIR.

1782.

The date of this letter--I hold it in one hand as I write, and for the
first time noticed that it has never in its hundred years been sealed or
folded, but only doubled once, lightly, and rolled in the hand, just as
the young Spanish officer might have carried it when he rode so hard to
bear it to its destination--its date is the last year but one of our
American Revolution. France, Spain, and the thirteen colonies were at war
with Great Britain, and the Indians were on both sides.

Galvez, the heroic young governor of Louisiana, had just been decorated by
his king and made a count for taking the forts at Manchac, Baton Rouge,
Natchez, and Mobile, and besieging and capturing the stronghold of
Pensacola, thus winning all west Florida, from the Mississippi to the
Appalachicola, for Spain. But this vast wilderness was not made safe; Fort
Panmure (Natchez) changed hands twice, and the land was full of Indians,
partly hirelin