ext time--next time, without fail!"

Nevertheless, he always reaped two proud delights from these events.
For one, Sosthene always took him upon his lap and introduced him as
his little Creole. And the other, the ex-governor came to these
demonstrations--the great governor! who lifted him to his knee and
told him of those wonderful things called cities, full of people that
could read and write; and about steamboats and steam-cars.

At length one day, when weddings had now pretty well thinned out the
ranks of Sosthene's family, the ex-governor made his appearance though
no marriage was impending. Bonaventure, sitting on his knee, asked why
he had come, and the ex-governor told him there was war.

"Do you not want to make haste and grow up and be a dragoon?"

The child was silent, and Sosthene laughed a little as he said
privately in English, which tongue his exceptional thrift had put him
in possession of:

"Aw, naw!"--he shook his head amusedly--"he dawn't like hoss. Go to
put him on hoss, he kick like a frog. Yass; squeal wuss'n a pig. But
still, sem time, you know, he ain't no coward; git mad in minute;
fight like little ole ram. Dawn't ondstand dat little fellah; he love
flower' like he was a gal."

"He ought to go to school," said the ex-governor. And Sosthene, half
to himself, responded in a hopeless tone:

"Yass." Neither Sosthene nor any of his children had ever done that.

CHAPTER III.

ATHANASIUS.

War it was. The horsemen grew scarce on the wide prairies of
Opelousas. Far away in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, on bloody fields,
many an Acadian volunteer and many a poor conscript fought and fell
for a cause that was really none of theirs, simple, non-slaveholding
peasants; and many died in camp and hospital--often of wounds, often
of fevers, often of mere longing for home. Bonaventure and Zosephine
learned this much of war: that it was a state of affairs in which dear
faces went away, and strange ones came back with tidings that brought
bitter wailings from mothers and wives, and made _les vieux_--the old
fathers--sit very silent. Three times over that was the way of it in
Sosthene's house.

It was also a condition of things that somehow changed boys into men
very young. A great distance away, but still in sight south-westward
across the prairie, a dot of dark green showed where dwelt a sister
and brother-in-law of Sosthene's _vieille_,--wife. There was not the
same domestic excellence ther