d and little boys round about. The children
talked apace. Only the girl whose hand he held in his right was mute.
She was taller than the rest; yet it was she to whom the little
big-eyed boy pointed when he said, vain of his ability to tell it in
English:--

"I don't got but eight year' old, me. I'm gran' for my age; but she,
she not gran' for her age--Sidonie; no; she not gran' at all for _her_
age."

They told the story of the chapel: how some years before, in the
Convent of the Sacred Heart, at the parish seat a few miles away on
the Mississippi, a nun had by the Pope's leave cast off the veil; how
she had come to Grande Pointe and taken charge of her widowed
brother's children; and how he had died, and she had found means, the
children knew not how, to build this chapel. And now she was buried
under it, they said. It seemed, from what they left unsaid as well as
what they said, that the simple influence of her presence had kindled
a desire for education in Grande Pointe not known before.

"Dass my _tante_--my hant. She _was_ my hant befo' she die'," said the
little man of eight years, hopping along the turf in front of the
rest. He dropped into a walk that looked rapid, facing round and
moving backward. "She learn me English, my _tante_. And she try to
learn Sidonie; but Sidonie, Sidonie fine that too strong to learn,
that English, Sidonie." He hopped again, talking as he hopped, and
holding the lifted foot in his hand. He could do that and speak
English at the same time, so talented was Toutou.

Thus the sun went down. And at Maximian's stile again Bonaventure
Deschamps took the children's cheeks into his slender fingers and
kissed them, one by one, beginning at the least, and so up, slowly,
toward Sidonie Le Blanc. With very earnest tenderness it was done,
some grave word of inspiration going before each caress; but when at
last he said, "To-morrow, dear chil'run, the school-bell shall ring in
Gran' Point'!" and turned to finish with Sidonie--she was gone.

CHAPTER IV.

HOW THE CHILDREN RANG THE BELL.

Where the fields go wild and grow into brakes, and the soil becomes
fenny, on the north-western edge of Grande Pointe, a dark, slender
thread of a bayou moves loiteringly north-eastward into a swamp of
huge cypresses. In there it presently meets another like itself, the
Bayou Tchackchou, slipping around from the little farm village's
eastern end as silently as a little mother comes out of a bower wh