e graceful by certain rudiments of taste. To say Sosthene, means
Madame Sosthene as well; and this is how it was that Zosephine
Gradnego and Bonaventure Deschamps, though they went not to school,
nevertheless had "advantages." For instance, the clean, hard-scrubbed
cypress floors beneath their pattering feet; the neat round
parti-colored mats at the doors that served them for towns and
villages; the strips of home-woven carpet that stood for roads--this
one to Mermentau, that one to Cote Gelee, a third _a la chapelle_; the
walls of unpainted pine; the beaded joists under the ceiling; the
home-made furniture, bedsteads and wardrobes of stained woods, and
hickory chairs with rawhide seats, hair uppermost; the white fringed
counterpanes on the high featherbeds; especially, in the principal
room, the house's one mantelpiece, of wood showily stained in three
colors and surmounted by a pair of gorgeous vases, beneath which the
two children used to stand and feast their eyes, worth fifty cents if
they were worth one,--these were as books to them indoors; and out in
the tiny garden, where they played wild horse and wild cow, and lay in
ambush for butterflies, they came under the spell of marigolds,
prince's-feathers, lady-slippers, immortelles, portulaca, jonquil,
lavender, althaea, love-apples, sage, violets, amaryllis, and that
grass ribbon they call _jarretiere de la vierge_,--the virgin's
garter.

Time passed; the children grew. The children older than they in the
same house became less and less like children, and began to disappear
from the family board and roof by a mysterious process called marrying,
which greatly mystified Zosephine, but equally pleased her by the
festive and jocund character of the occasions, times when there was a
ravishing abundance of fried rice-cakes and _boulettes_--beef-balls.

To Bonaventure these affairs brought less mystery and less unalloyed
pleasure. He understood them better. Some boys are born lovers. From
the time they can reach out from the nurse's arms, they must be
billing and cooing and choosing a mate. Such was ardent little
Bonaventure; and none of the Gradnego weddings ever got quite through
its ceremony without his big blue eyes being found full of
tears--tears of mingled anger and desolation--because by some
unpardonable oversight he and Zosephine were still left unmarried. So
that the pretty damsel would have to take him aside, and kiss him as
they clasped, and promise him, "N