AURORA AS A HISTORIAN

Alas! the phonograph was invented three-quarters of a century too late.
If type could entrap one-half the pretty oddities of Aurora's
speech,--the arch, the pathetic, the grave, the earnest, the
matter-of-fact, the ecstatic tones of her voice,--nay, could it but
reproduce the movement of her hands, the eloquence of her eyes, or the
shapings of her mouth,--ah! but type--even the phonograph--is such an
inadequate thing! Sometimes she laughed; sometimes Clotilde,
unexpectedly to herself, joined her; and twice or thrice she provoked a
similar demonstration from the ox-like apothecary,--to her own intense
amusement. Sometimes she shook her head in solemn scorn; and, when
Frowenfeld, at a certain point where Palmyre's fate locked hands for a
time with that of Bras-Coupe, asked a fervid question concerning that
strange personage, tears leaped into her eyes, as she said:

"Ah! 'Sieur Frowenfel', iv I tra to tell de sto'y of Bras-Coupe, I goin'
to cry lag a lill bebby."

The account of the childhood days upon the plantation at Cannes Brulees
may be passed by. It was early in Palmyre's fifteenth year that that
Kentuckian, 'mutual friend' of her master and Agricola, prevailed with
M. de Grapion to send her to the paternal Grandissime mansion,--a
complimentary gift, through Agricola, to Mademoiselle, his
niece,--returnable ten years after date.

The journey was made in safety; and, by and by, Palmyre was presented to
her new mistress. The occasion was notable. In a great chair in the
centre sat the _grandpere_, a Chevalier de Grandissime, whose business
had narrowed down to sitting on the front veranda and wearing his
decorations,--the cross of St. Louis being one; on his right, Colonel
Numa Grandissime, with one arm dropped around Honore, then a boy of
Palmyre's age, expecting to be off in sixty days for France; and on the
left, with Honore's fair sister nestled against her, "Madame Numa," as
the Creoles would call her, a stately woman and beautiful, a great
admirer of her brother Agricola. (Aurora took pains to explain that she
received these minutiae from Palmyre herself in later years.) One other
member of the group was a young don of some twenty years' age, not an
inmate of the house, but only a cousin of Aurora on her deceased
mother's side. To make the affair complete, and as a seal to this tacit
Grandissime-de-Grapion treaty, this sole available representative of the
"other side" was made a g