ere
wanting here and there to achieve perfection, when suddenly the old man
died. Yet it was his proud satisfaction, before he finally lay down, to
see Ursin a favored companion and the peer, both in courtesy and pride,
of those polished gentlemen famous in history, the brothers Lafitte.

The two Lafittes were, at the time young Lemaitre reached his majority
(say 1808 or 1812), only merchant-blacksmiths, so to speak, a term
intended to convey the idea of blacksmiths who never soiled their hands,
who were men of capital, stood a little higher than the clergy, and
moved in society among its autocrats. But they were full of
possibilities, men of action, and men, too, of thought, with already a
pronounced disbelief in the custom-house. In these days of big carnivals
they would have been patented as the dukes of Little Manchac and
Barataria.

Young Ursin Lemaitre (in full the name was Lemaitre-Vignevielle) had not
only the hearty friendship of these good people, but also a natural turn
for accounts; and as his two friends were looking about them with an
enterprising eye, it easily resulted that he presently connected himself
with the blacksmithing profession. Not exactly at the forge in the
Lafittes' famous smithy, among the African Samsons, who, with their
shining black bodies bared to the waist, made the Rue St. Pierre ring
with the stroke of their hammers; but as a--there was no occasion to
mince the word in those days--smuggler.

Smuggler--patriot--where was the difference? Beyond the ken of a
community to which the enforcement of the revenue laws had long been
merely so much out of every man's pocket and dish, into the
all-devouring treasury of Spain. At this date they had come under a
kinder yoke, and to a treasury that at least echoed when the customs
were dropped into it; but the change was still new. What could a man be
more than Capitaine Lemaitre was--the soul of honor, the pink of
courtesy, with the courage of the lion, and the magnanimity of the
elephant; frank--the very exchequer of truth! Nay, go higher still: his
paper was good in Toulouse Street. To the gossips in the gaming-clubs he
was the culminating proof that smuggling was one of the sublimer
virtues.

Years went by. Events transpired which have their place in history.
Under a government which the community by and by saw was conducted in
their interest, smuggling began to lose its respectability and to grow
disreputable, hazardous, and debased. In