e _melee_, still head and shoulders above all, wilder,
with the cup of the wicked, than any beast, is the man of God from the
Florida parishes!

In his arms he bore--and all the people shouted at once when they saw
it--the tiger. He had lifted it high up with its back to his breast, his
arms clasped under its shoulders; the wretched brute had curled up
caterpillar-wise, with its long tail against its belly, and through its
filed teeth grinned a fixed and impotent wrath. And Parson Jones was
shouting:--

"The tiger and the buffler _shell_ lay down together! You dah to say
they shayn't and I'll comb you with this varmint from head to foot! The
tiger and the buffler _shell_ lay down together. They _shell_! Now, you,
Joe! Behold! I am here to see it done. The lion and the buffler _shell_
lay down together!"

Mouthing these words again and again, the parson forced his way through
the surge in the wake of the buffalo. This creature the Latins had
secured by a lariat over his head, and were dragging across the old
rampart and into a street of the city.

The Northern races were trying to prevent, and there was pommeling and
knocking down, cursing and knife-drawing, until Jules St.-Ange was quite
carried away with the fun, laughed, clapped his hands, and swore with
delight, and ever kept close to the gallant parson.

Joe, contrariwise, counted all this child's-play an interruption. He had
come to find Colossus and the money. In an unlucky moment he made bold
to lay hold of the parson, but a piece of the broken barriers in the
hands of a flatboatman felled him to the sod, the terrible crowd swept
over him, the lariat was cut, and the giant parson hurled the tiger upon
the buffalo's back. In another instant both brutes were dead at the
hands of the mob; Jones was lifted from his feet, and prating of
Scripture and the millennium, of Paul at Ephesus and Daniel in the
"buffler's" den, was borne aloft upon the shoulders of the huzzaing
_Americains_. Half an hour later he was sleeping heavily on the floor of
a cell in the _calaboza_.

When Parson Jones awoke, a bell was somewhere tolling for midnight.
Somebody was at the door of his cell with a key. The lock grated, the
door swung, the turnkey looked in and stepped back, and a ray of
moonlight fell upon M. Jules St.-Ange. The prisoner sat upon the empty
shackles and ring-bolt in the centre of the floor.

"Misty Posson Jone'," said the visitor, softly.

"O Jools!"

"_Mais_,