ork
went on. Intense days for Bonaventure. The clouds of disfavor darkling
in some places, but brightening in others, and, on the whole, he hoped
and believed, breaking. A few days of vacation, and then a bright
re-union and resumption, the children all his faithful adherents save
one--Sidonie. She, a close student, too, but growingly distant and
reticent. The State Superintendent still believed to be--

"Impending, impending, chil'run! he is impending! Any day he may
precipitate upon us!"

Intense days, too, for Claude. Sidonie openly, and oh, so sweetly, his
friend. Loving him? He could neither say nor know; enough, for the
present, to be allowed to love her. His love knew no spirit of
conquest yet; it was star-worship; it was angel adoration;
seraphically pure; something so celestially refined that had it been a
tangible object you could have held it up and seen the stars right
through it. The thought of acquisition would have seemed like coveting
the gold of a temple. And yet already the faintest hint of loss was
intolerable. Oh! this happy, happy school-going,--this faring
sumptuously on one smile a day! Ah, if it might but continue! But
alas! how Sidonie was growing! Growing, growing daily! up, up, up!
While he--there was a tree in the swamp where he measured his stature
every day; but in vain, in vain! It never budged! And then--all at
once--like the rose-vine on her galerie, Sidonie burst into bloom.

Her smiles were kinder and more frequent now than ever before; but
the boy's heart was wrung. What chance now? In four long years to come
he would not yet be quite nineteen, and she was fifteen now. Four
years! He was in no hurry himself--could wait forever and be happy
every day of it; but she? Such prize as she, somebody would certainly
bear away before three years could run by, run they ever so fast.

Sitting and pondering one evening in the little bayou cabin, Claude
caught the father's eye upon him, leaned his forehead upon the
parent's knee, and silently wept. The rough woodman said a kind word,
and the boy, without lifting his burning face, told his love. The
father made no reply for a long time, and then he said in their quaint
old French:

"Claude, tell the young schoolmaster. Of all men, he is the one to
help you." And then in English, as you would quote Latin, "Knowledge
is power!"

The next day he missed--failed miserably--in every lesson. At its
close he sat at his desk, crushed. Bonaventure se