tlined making a hopeless ford.
The current was so broad that its sweep extended beyond the reach of
sight; and perhaps the strangest object carried by this tremendous force
was a small clapboarded house. Its back and front doors stood open, and
in the middle of the floor stood a solitary chair. One expected to see a
figure emerge from a hidden corner and sit down forlornly in the chair.

The slender voice of a violin stole across the water,--an exorcism of
the spell that had fallen on Kaskaskia. As the boat reached the tavern
corner, this thread of melody was easily followed to the ballroom on the
second floor of the tavern, where the Assembly balls were danced. A
slave, who had nothing but his daily bread to lose, and who would be
assured of that by the hand of charity when his master could no longer
maintain him, might take up the bow and touch the fiddle gayly in such a
time of general calamity. But there was also dancing in the ballroom.
The boat turned south and shot down a canal bordered by trunkless shade
trees, which had been one of the principal streets of Kaskaskia. At the
instant of turning, however, Father Baby could be seen as he whirled,
though his skinny head and gray capote need not have added their
evidence to the exact sound of his foot which came so distinctly across
the water. His little shop, his goods, his secret stocking-leg of
coin,--for Father Baby was his own banker,--were buried out of sight.
His crop in the common fields and provision for winter lay also under
the Mississippi. His late lodger had taken to the river, and was
probably drowned. He had no warrant except in the nimbleness of his
slave's legs that he even had a slave left. Yet he had never in his life
felt so full of dance. The flood mounted to his head like wine. Father
Olivier was in the tavern without forbidding it. Doubtless he thought
the example an exhilarating one, when a grown-up child could dance over
material loss, remembering only the joy of life.

Wachique had felt her bundle squirm from the moment it was given to her.
She enlarged on the hint Colonel Menard had given, and held the drapery
bound tightly around the prisoner. The boat shot past the church, and
over the spot where St. John's bonfire had so recently burnt out, and
across that street through which the girls had scampered on their
Midsummer Night errand.

"But stop," said Colonel Menard; and he pointed out to the rowers an
obstruction which none of them had