ere
she has just put her babe to sleep. A little farther on they are
joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on
northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed,
blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of
Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny
breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens. From
Lake Maurepas one can go up Amite or Tickfaw River, or to Pass Manchac
or Pontchatoula, anywhere in the world, in fact,--where a canoe can
go.

On a bank of this bayou, no great way from Grande Pointe, but with the
shadow of the swamp at its back and a small, bright prairie of rushes
and giant reeds stretching away from the opposite shore, stood, more
in the water than on the land, the palmetto-thatched fishing and
hunting lodge and only home of a man who on the other side of the
Atlantic you would have known for a peasant of Normandy, albeit he
was born in this swamp,--the man who had tarried all day at the
schoolmaster's handshaking.

What a day that had been! Once before he had witnessed a positive
event. That was when, one day, he journeyed purposely to the levee of
Belle Alliance, waited from morning till evening, and at last saw the
steamer "Robert E. Lee" come by, and, as fortune would have it, land!
loaded with cotton from the water to the hurricane deck. He had gone
home resolved from that moment to save his money, and be something
more than he was.

But that event had flashed before his eyes, and in a quarter-hour was
gone, save in his memory. The coming of the schoolmaster, all
unforeseen, had lasted a day, and he had seen it from beginning to
end. All day long on 'Mian's galerie, standing now here, now there, he
had got others to interpret for him, where he could not guess, the
meanings of the wise and noble utterances that fell every now and then
from the lips of the young soldier of learning, and stored them away
in his now greedy mind.

One saying in particular, whose originality he did not dream of
questioning, took profound hold of his conviction and admiration; and
two or three times that evening, as his canoe glided homeward in the
twilight, its one long, smooth ripple gleaming on this side and that
as it widened away toward the bayou's dark banks, he rested for a
moment on his tireless paddle, and softly broke the silence of the
wilderness with its three simple words, so trite to our ears, s