irst, drowning,
nakedness, dirt, fetichism, debauchery, slaughter, pestilence and the
rest--she was their heiress; they left her the cinders of human
feelings. She remembered her mother. They had been separated in her
childhood, in Virginia when it was a province. She remembered, with
pride, the price her mother had brought at auction, and remarked, as an
additional interesting item, that she had never seen or heard of her
since. She had had children, assorted colors--had one with her now, the
black boy that brought the basil to Joseph; the others were here and
there, some in the Grandissime households or field-gangs, some elsewhere
within occasional sight, some dead, some not accounted for.
Husbands--like the Samaritan woman's. We know she was a constant singer
and laugher.

And so on that day, when Honore Grandissime had advised the
Governor-General of Louisiana to be very careful to avoid demonstration
of any sort if he wished to avert a street war in his little capital,
Clemence went up one street and down another, singing her song and
laughing her professional merry laugh. How could it be otherwise? Let
events take any possible turn, how could it make any difference to
Clemence? What could she hope to gain? What could she fear to lose? She
sold some of her goods to Casa Calvo's Spanish guard and sang them a
Spanish song; some to Claiborne's soldiers and sang them Yankee Doodle
with unclean words of her own inspiration, which evoked true soldiers'
laughter; some to a priest at his window, exchanging with him a pious
comment or two upon the wickedness of the times generally and their
Americain Protestant-poisoned community in particular; and (after going
home to dinner and coming out newly furnished) she sold some more of her
wares to the excited groups of Creoles to which we have had occasion to
allude, and from whom, insensible as she was to ribaldry, she was glad
to escape. The day now drawing to a close, she turned her steps toward
her wonted crouching-place, the willow avenue on the levee, near the
Place d'Armes. But she had hardly defined this decision clearly in her
mind, and had but just turned out of the rue St. Louis, when her song
attracted an ear in a second-story room under whose window she was
passing. As usual, it was fitted to the passing event:

"_Apportez moi mo' sabre,
Ba boum, ba boum, boum, boum_."

"Run, fetch that girl here," said Dr. Keene to the slave woman who had
just entered