d to all these commotions, a hideous
revolution had swept over San Domingo; the slaves in Louisiana had heard
of it, insurrection was feared, and at length, in 1794, when Susanne was
seventeen and Francoise fifteen, it broke out on the Mississippi no great
matter over a day's ride from their own home, and twenty-three blacks were
gibbeted singly at intervals all the way down by their father's plantation
and on to New Orleans, and were left swinging in the weather to insure the
peace and felicity of the land. Two other matters are all we need notice
for the ready comprehension of Francoise's story. Immigration was knocking
at every gate of the province, and citizen Etienne de Bore had just made
himself forever famous in the history of Louisiana by producing
merchantable sugar; land was going to be valuable, even back on the wild
prairies of Opelousas and Attakapas, where, twenty years before, the
Acadians,--the cousins of Evangeline,--wandering from far Nova Scotia, had
settled. Such was the region and such were the times when it began to be
the year 1795.

By good fortune one of the undestroyed fragments of Francoise's own
manuscript is its first page. She was already a grandmother forty-three
years old when in 1822 she wrote the tale she had so often told. Part of
the dedication to her only daughter and namesake--one line, possibly
two--has been torn off, leaving only the words, "ma fille unique a la
grasse [meaning 'grace'] de dieu [sic]," over her signature and the date,
"14 Julet [sic], 1822."

I.

THE TWO SISTERS.

It is to give pleasure to my dear daughter Fannie and to her children that
I write this journey. I shall be well satisfied if I can succeed in giving
them this pleasure: by the grace of God, Amen.

Papa, Mr. Pierre Bossier, planter of St. James parish, had been fifteen
days gone to the city (New Orleans) in his skiff with two rowers, Louis
and Baptiste, when, returning, he embraced us all, gave us some caramels
which he had in his pockets, and announced that he counted on leaving us
again in four or five days to go to Attakapas. He had long been speaking
of going there. Papa and mamma were German, and papa loved to travel. When
he first came to Louisiana it was with no expectation of staying. But here
he saw mamma; he loved her, married her, and bought a very fine
plantation, where he cultivated indigo. You know they blue clothes with
that drug, and dye cottonade and other things. There we,