tread of the delicate Creole feet is all at
once swallowed up by the sound of many heavier steps in the hall, and
the fathers, grandfathers, sons, brothers, uncles and nephews of the
great family come out, not a man of them that cannot, with a little
care, keep on his feet. Their descendants of the present day sip from
shallower glasses and with less marked results.

The matrons, rising, offer the chief seat to the first comer, the
great-grandsire--the oldest living Grandissime--Alcibiade, a shaken but
unfallen monument of early colonial days, a browned and corrugated
souvenir of De Vaudreuil's pomps, of O'Reilly's iron rule, of Galvez'
brilliant wars--a man who had seen Bienville and Zephyr Grandissime.
With what splendor of manner Madame Fusilier de Grandissime offers, and
he accepts, the place of honor! Before he sits down he pauses a moment
to hear out the companion on whose arm he had been leaning. But
Theophile, a dark, graceful youth of eighteen, though he is recounting
something with all the oblivious ardor of his kind, becomes instantly
silent, bows with grave deference to the ladies, hands the aged
forefather gracefully to his seat, and turning, recommences the recital
before one who hears all with the same perfect courtesy--his beloved
cousin Honore.

Meanwhile, the gentlemen throng out. Gallant crew! These are they who
have been pausing proudly week after week in an endeavor (?) to
understand the opaque motives of Numa's son.

In the middle of the veranda pauses a tall, muscular man of fifty, with
the usual smooth face and an iron-gray queue. That is Colonel Agamemnon
Brahmin de Grandissime, purveyor to the family's military pride,
conservator of its military glory, and, after Honore, the most admired
of the name. Achille Grandissime, he who took Agricola away from
Frowenfeld's shop in the carriage, essays to engage Agamemnon in
conversation, and the colonel, with a glance at his kinsman's nether
limbs and another at his own, and with that placid facility with which
the graver sort of Creoles take up the trivial topics of the lighter,
grapples the subject of boots. A tall, bronzed, slender young man, who
prefixes to Grandissime the maternal St. Blancard, asks where his wife
is, is answered from a distance, throws her a kiss and sits down on a
step, with Jean Baptiste de Grandissime, a piratical-looking
black-beard, above him, and Alphonse Mandarin, an olive-skinned boy,
below. Valentine Grandissime, of T