ved, early epauletted fellows, who did
not let twenty-one catch them without wives sealed with the authentic
wedding kiss, nor allow twenty-two to find them without an heir. But
they had a sad aptness for dying young. It was altogether supposable
that they would have spread out broadly in the land; but they were such
inveterate duelists, such brave Indian-fighters, such adventurous
swamp-rangers, and such lively free-livers, that, however numerously
their half-kin may have been scattered about in an unacknowledged way,
the avowed name of De Grapion had become less and less frequent in lists
where leading citizens subscribed their signatures, and was not to be
seen in the list of managers of the late ball.

It is not at all certain that so hot a blood would not have boiled away
entirely before the night of the _bal masque_, but for an event which
led to the union of that blood with a stream equally clear and ruddy,
but of a milder vintage. This event fell out some fifty-two years after
that cast of the dice which made the princess Lufki-Humma the mother of
all the Fusiliers and of none of the De Grapions. Clotilde, the
Casket-Girl, the little maid who would not marry, was one of an heroic
sort, worth--the De Grapions maintained--whole swampfuls of Indian
queens. And yet the portrait of this great ancestress, which served as a
pattern to one who, at the ball, personated the long-deceased heroine
_en masque_, is hopelessly lost in some garret. Those Creoles have such
a shocking way of filing their family relics and records in rat-holes.

One fact alone remains to be stated: that the De Grapions, try to spurn
it as they would, never could quite suppress a hard feeling in the face
of the record, that from the two young men, who, when lost in the
horrors of Louisiana's swamps, had been esteemed as good as dead, and
particularly from him who married at his leisure,--from Zephyr de
Grandissime,--sprang there so many as the sands of the Mississippi
innumerable.

CHAPTER V

A MAIDEN WHO WILL NOT MARRY

Midway between the times of Lufki-Humma and those of her proud
descendant, Agricola Fusilier, fifty-two years lying on either side,
were the days of Pierre Rigaut, the magnificent, the "Grand Marquis,"
the Governor, De Vaudreuil. He was the Solomon of Louisiana. For
splendor, however, not for wisdom. Those were the gala days of license,
extravagance and pomp. He made paper money to be as the leaves of the
forest for m