e parish, and known as
the common pasture. Jean could see the church of the Immaculate
Conception and the tower built for its ancient bell, the convent
northward, and all the pleasant streets bowered in trees. The wharf was
crowded with vessels from New Orleans and Cahokia, and the arched stone
bridge across the Okaw was a thoroughfare of hurrying carriages.

The road at the foot of the bluff, more than a hundred feet below Jean,
showed its white flint belt in distant laps and stretches through
northern foliage. It led to the territorial governor's country-seat of
Elvirade; thence to Fort Chartres and Prairie du Rocher; so on to
Cahokia, where it met the great trails of the far north. The road also
swarmed with carriages and riders on horses, all moving toward Colonel
Pierre Menard's house. Jean could not see his seignior's chimneys for
the trees and the dismantled and deserted earthworks of Fort Gage. The
fort had once protected Kaskaskia, but in these early peaceful times of
the Illinois Territory it no longer maintained a garrison.

The lad guessed what was going on; those happy Kaskaskians, the fine
world, were having a ball at Colonel Menard's. Summer and winter they
danced, they made fetes, they enjoyed life. When the territorial
Assembly met in this capital of the West, he had often frosted himself
late into the winter night, watching the lights and listening to the
music in Kaskaskia. Jean Lozier knew every bit of its history. The
parish priest, Father Olivier, who came to hear him confess because he
could not leave his grandfather, had told it to him. There was a record
book transmitted from priest to priest from the earliest settlement of
Cascasquia of the Illinois. Jean loved the story of young D'Artaguette,
whom the boatmen yet celebrated in song. On moonlight nights, when the
Mississippi showed its broad sheet four miles away across the level
plain, he sometimes fooled himself with thinking he could see the fleet
of young soldiers passing down the river, bearing the French flag;
phantoms proceeding again to their tragedy and the Indian stake.

He admired the seat where his seignior lived in comfort and great
hospitality, but all the crowds pressing to Pierre Menard's house seemed
to him to have less wisdom than the single man who met and passed them
and crossed the bridge into Kaskaskia. The vesper bell rung, breaking
its music in echoes against the sandstone bosom of the bluff. Red
splendors faded from t