to bear's meat, sagamite and beans.
The queen sat down with them, clothed in her entire wardrobe: vest of
swan's skin, with facings of purple and green from the neck of the
mallard; petticoat of plaited hair, with embroideries of quills;
leggings of fawn-skin; garters of wampum; black and green serpent-skin
moccasins, that rested on pelts of tiger-cat and buffalo; armlets of
gars' scales, necklaces of bears' claws and alligators' teeth, plaited
tresses, plumes of raven and flamingo, wing of the pink curlew, and
odors of bay and sassafras. Young men danced before them, blowing upon
reeds, hooting, yelling, rattling beans in gourds and touching hands and
feet. One day was like another, and the nights were made brilliant with
flambeau dances and processions.

Some days later M. D'Iberville's canoe fleet, returning down the river,
found and took from the shore the two men, whom they had given up for
dead, and with them, by her own request, the abdicating queen, who left
behind her a crowd of weeping and howling squaws and warriors. Three
canoes that put off in their wake, at a word from her, turned back; but
one old man leaped into the water, swam after them a little way, and
then unexpectedly sank. It was that cautious wader but inexperienced
swimmer, the Listening Crane.

When the expedition reached Biloxi, there were two suitors for the hand
of Agricola's great ancestress. Neither of them was Zephyr Grandissime.
(Ah! the strong heads of those Grandissimes.)

They threw dice for her. Demosthenes De Grapion--he who, tradition
says, first hoisted the flag of France over the little fort--seemed to
think he ought to have a chance, and being accorded it, cast an
astonishingly high number; but Epaminondas cast a number higher by one
(which Demosthenes never could quite understand), and got a wife who had
loved him from first sight.

Thus, while the pilgrim fathers of the Mississippi Delta with Gallic
recklessness were taking wives and moot-wives from the ill specimens of
three races, arose, with the church's benediction, the royal house of
the Fusiliers in Louisiana. But the true, main Grandissime stock, on
which the Fusiliers did early, ever, and yet do, love to marry, has kept
itself lily-white ever since France has loved lilies--as to marriage,
that is; as to less responsible entanglements, why, of course--

After a little, the disappointed Demosthenes, with due ecclesiastical
sanction, also took a most excellent wife,