u have taught them to spell and read, though
God will be good to you for that! But these two years you have been
every thing to them--every thing. They will be orphaned over again,
Bonaventure." Tears shone in her eyes, and she turned away her face
with her dropped hands clasped together.

The young man laid his hand upon her drooping brow. She turned again
and lifted her eyes to his. His lips moved silently, but she read upon
them the unheard utterance: it was a word of blessing and farewell.
Slowly and tenderly she drew down his hand, laid a kiss upon it, and
said,--

"_Adjieu--adjieu_," and they parted.

As Zosephine, with erect form and firm, clear tread, went by her
parents and into the inner room where her children lay in their
trundle-bed, the old mother said to _le vieux_,--

"You can go ahead and repair the schoolhouse now. Our daughter will
want to begin, even to-morrow, to teach the children of the
village--_les zonfants a la chapelle_."

"You think so?" said Sosthene, but not as if he doubted.

"Yes; it is certain now that Zosephine will always remain the Widow
'Thanase."

GRANDE POINTE.

CHAPTER I.

A STRANGER.

From College Point to Bell's Point, sixty miles above New Orleans, the
Mississippi runs nearly from west to east. Both banks, or "coasts,"
are lined with large and famous sugar-plantations. Midway on the
northern side, lie the beautiful estates of "Belmont" and "Belle
Alliance." Early one morning in the middle of October, 1878, a young
man, whose age you would have guessed fifteen years too much, stood in
scrupulously clean, ill-fitting, flimsy garments, on the strong, high
levee overlooking these two plantations. He was asking the way to a
place called Grande Pointe. Grand Point, he called it, and so may we:
many names in Louisiana that retain the French spelling are habitually
given an English pronunciation.

A tattered negro mounted on a sunburnt, unshod, bare-backed mule, down
in the dusty gray road on the land-side of the embankment, was his
only hearer. Fifteen years earlier these two men, with French accents,
strangers to each other, would hardly have conversed in English; but
the date made the difference. We need not inexorably render the
dialect of the white man; pretty enough to hear, it would often be
hideous to print. The letter _r_, for instance, that plague of all
nations--before consonants it disappeared; before vowels the tongue
failed of that upward cur