s with whom they had ever had to
do. It was not hard for the old mansion to forgive him once or twice;
but she had had to do it often. It seems no over-stretch of fancy to
say she sometimes gazed down upon his erring ways with a look of patient
sadness in her large and beautiful windows.

And how had that forbearance been rewarded? Take one short instance:
when, seven years before this present _fete de grandpere_, he came back
from Europe, and she (this old home which we cannot help but personify),
though in trouble then--a trouble that sent up the old feud flames
again--opened her halls to rejoice in him with the joy of all her
gathered families, he presently said such strange things in favor of
indiscriminate human freedom that for very shame's sake she hushed them
up, in the fond hope that he would outgrow such heresies. But he? On top
of all the rest, he declined a military commission and engaged in
commerce--"shopkeeping, _parbleu!_"

However, therein was developed a grain of consolation. Honore became--as
he chose to call it--more prudent. With much tact, Agricola was amiably
crowded off the dictator's chair, to become, instead, a sort of
seneschal. For a time the family peace was perfect, and Honore, by a
touch here to-day and a word there to-morrow, was ever lifting the name,
and all who bore it, a little and a little higher; when suddenly, as in
his father's day--that dear Numa who knew how to sacrifice his very
soul, as a sort of Iphigenia for the propitiation of the family gods--as
in Numa's day came the cession to Spain, so now fell this other cession,
like an unexpected tornado, threatening the wreck of her children's
slave-schooners and the prostration alike of their slave-made crops and
their Spanish liberties; and just in the fateful moment where Numa would
have stood by her, Honore had let go. Ah, it was bitter!

"See what foreign education does!" cried a Mandarin de Grandissime of
the Baton Rouge Coast. "I am sorry now"--derisively--"that I never sent
_my_ boy to France, am I not? No! No-o-o! I would rather my son should
never know how to read, than that he should come back from Paris
repudiating the sentiments and prejudices of his own father. Is
education better than family peace? Ah, bah! My son make friends with
Americains and tell me they--that call a negro 'monsieur'--are as good
as his father? But that is what we get for letting Honore become a
merchant. Ha! the degradation! Shaking hands with