eve in a flesh-and-blood Manon
may perhaps take encouragement from the fact that the arrival in the
colony of a Chevalier des Grieux, in the year 1719, fourteen years
before the book appeared, has been established, and, further, that the
name of the Chevalier des Grieux may be seen upon a crumbling tomb in
one of the river parishes.

When the girls arrived they were on inspection in the daytime, but at
night were carefully guarded by soldiers, in the house where they were
quartered together. Miss Grace King, in her delightful book, "New
Orleans, the Place and the People," tells us that in these times there
were never enough girls to fill the demand for wives, and that in one
instance two young bachelors proposed to fight over a very plain
girl--the last one left out of a shipload--but that the commandant
obliged them to settle their dispute by the more pacific means of
drawing lots. As the place became settled Ursuline sisters arrived and
established schools. And at last, a quarter of a century after the
landing of the first shipment of girls, the curious history of female
importations ended with the arrival of that famous band of sixty
demoiselles of respectable family and "authenticated spotless
reputation," who came to be taken as wives by only the more prosperous
young colonists of the better class. The earlier, less reputable girls
have come down to us by the name of "correction girls," but these later
arrivals--each furnished by the Company of the West with a casket
containing a trousseau--are known to this day as _les filles a la
cassette_, or "casket girls."

A curious feature of this bit of history, as it applies to present-day
New Orleans, is that though one hears of many families that claim
descent from some nice, well-behaved "casket girl," one never by any
chance hears of a family claiming to be descended from a lady of the
other stock. When it is considered that the "correction girls" far
outnumbered their virtuous sisters of the casket, and ought, therefore,
by the law of averages, to have left a greater progeny, the matter
becomes stranger still, taking on a scientific interest. The explanation
must, however, be left to some mind more astute than mine--some mind
capable, perhaps, of unraveling also those other riddles of New Orleans
namely: Who was the mysterious chevalier who many years ago invented
that most delectable of _sucreries_, the praline, and whither did he
vanish? And how, although the refu