rejudices, a stroke of apoplexy
took him off suddenly. The double wear of toil and care had told upon
one of those organisms which the mixture of the black and white races
often produces, athletic in appearance, but of a very keen sensibility,
in which the vital resistance is not in proportion to the muscular
vigor.

Whatever care the man, so deeply grieved by the blemish upon his birth,
had taken to preserve his children from a similar experience, he had not
been able to do so, and soon after his son entered Beaumont his trials
began. The few boys with whom Florent was thrown in contact, in the
hotels or in his walks, during his sojourn in America, had already made
him feel that humiliation from which his father had suffered so much.
The youth of twelve, silent and absurdly sensitive, who made his
appearance on the lawn of the peaceful English college on an autumn
morning, brought with him a self-love already bleeding, to whom it was
a delightful surprise to find himself among comrades of his age who did
not even seem to suspect that any difference separated them from him. It
required the perception of a Yankee to discern, beneath the nails of the
handsome boy with the dark complexion, the tiny drops of negro blood, so
far removed. Between an octoroon and a creole a European can never tell
the difference. Florent had been represented as what he really was, the
grandson of one of the Emperor's best officers. His father had taken
particular pains to designate him as French, and his companions only
saw in him a pupil like themselves, coming from Alabama--that is to say,
from a country almost as chimerical as Japan or China.

All who in early youth have known the torture of apprehension will be
able to judge of the poor child's agony when, after four months of a
life amid the warmth of sympathy, one of the Jesuit fathers who directed
the college announced to him, thinking it would afford him pleasure, the
expected arrival of an American, of young Lincoln Maitland. This was to
Florent so violent a shock that he had a fever for forty-eight hours.
In after years he could remember what thoughts possessed him on the day
when he descended from his room to the common refectory, sure that as
soon as he was brought face to face with the new pupil he would have
to sustain the disdainful glance suffered so frequently in the United
States. There was no doubt in his mind that, his origin once discovered,
the atmosphere of kindness in