alculations, or ten
eternities,--the heart and the almanac never agree about time,--but
one morning old Champigny (they used to call him Champignon) was
walking along his levee front, calculating how soon the water would
come over, and drown him out, as the Louisianians say. It was before a
seven-o'clock breakfast, cold, wet, rainy, and discouraging. The road
was knee-deep in mud, and so broken up with hauling, that it was like
walking upon waves to get over it. A shower poured down. Old Champigny
was hurrying in when he saw a figure approaching. He had to stop to
look at it, for it was worth while. The head was hidden by a green
barege veil, which the showers had plentifully besprinkled with dew; a
tall, thin figure. Figure! No; not even could it be called a figure:
straight up and down, like a finger or a post; high-shouldered, and
a step--a step like a plow-man's. No umbrella; no--nothing more, in
fact. It does not sound so peculiar as when first related--something
must be forgotten. The feet--oh, yes, the feet--they were like
waffle-irons, or frying-pans, or anything of that shape.

Old Champigny did not care for women--he never had; they simply did
not exist for him in the order of nature. He had been married once,
it is true, about a half century before; but that was not reckoned
against the existence of his prejudice, because he was _celibataire_
to his finger-tips, as any one could see a mile away. But that woman
_intrigue'd_ him.

He had no servant to inquire from. He performed all of his own
domestic work in the wretched little cabin that replaced his old home.
For Champigny also belonged to the great majority of the _nouveaux
pauvres_. He went out into the rice-field, where were one or two
hands that worked on shares with him, and he asked them. They knew
immediately; there is nothing connected with the parish that a
field-hand does not know at once. She was the teacher of the colored
public school some three or four miles away. "Ah," thought Champigny,
"some Northern lady on a mission." He watched to see her return in the
evening, which she did, of course; in a blinding rain. Imagine the
green barege veil then; for it remained always down over her face.

[Illustration: CHAMPIGNY.]

Old Champigny could not get over it that he had never seen her before.
But he must have seen her, and, with his abstraction and old age, not
have noticed her, for he found out from the negroes that she had been
teaching four