from the first cargo of House
of Correction girls. Her biography, too, is as short as Methuselah's, or
shorter; she died. Zephyr Grandissime married, still later, a lady of
rank, a widow without children, sent from France to Biloxi under a
_lettre de cachet_. Demosthenes De Grapion, himself an only son, left
but one son, who also left but one. Yet they were prone to early
marriages.

So also were the Grandissimes, or, as the name is signed in all the old
notarial papers, the Brahmin Mandarin de Grandissimes. That was one
thing that kept their many-stranded family line so free from knots and
kinks. Once the leisurely Zephyr gave them a start, generation followed
generation with a rapidity that kept the competing De Grapions
incessantly exasperated, and new-made Grandissime fathers continually
throwing themselves into the fond arms and upon the proud necks of
congratulatory grandsires. Verily it seemed as though their family tree
was a fig-tree; you could not look for blossoms on it, but there,
instead, was the fruit full of seed. And with all their speed they were
for the most part fine of stature, strong of limb and fair of face. The
old nobility of their stock, including particularly the unnamed blood of
her of the _lettre de cachet_, showed forth in a gracefulness of
carriage, that almost identified a De Grandissime wherever you saw him,
and in a transparency of flesh and classic beauty of feature, that made
their daughters extra-marriageable in a land and day which was bearing a
wide reproach for a male celibacy not of the pious sort.

In a flock of Grandissimes might always be seen a Fusilier or two;
fierce-eyed, strong-beaked, dark, heavy-taloned birds, who, if they
could not sing, were of rich plumage, and could talk, and bite, and
strike, and keep up a ruffled crest and a self-exalting bad humor. They
early learned one favorite cry, with which they greeted all strangers,
crying the louder the more the endeavor was made to appease them:
"Invaders! Invaders!"

There was a real pathos in the contrast offered to this family line by
that other which sprang up, as slenderly as a stalk of wild oats, from
the loins of Demosthenes De Grapion. A lone son following a lone son,
and he another--it was sad to contemplate, in that colonial beginning of
days, three generations of good, Gallic blood tripping jocundly along in
attenuated Indian file. It made it no less pathetic to see that they
were brilliant, gallant, much-lo