e old tobacco-shed where Bonaventure had kept school before the
schoolhouse was built. The sheltering curtains of deep forest had
broken the onset of the wind, and the little cotton, corn, and tobacco
fields, already harvested, were merely made a little more tattered and
brown. The November air was pure, sunny, and mild, and thrilled every
now and then with the note of some lingering bird. A green and bosky
confusion still hid house from house and masked from itself the all
but motionless human life of the sleepy woods village. Only an
adventitious China-tree here and there had been stripped of its golden
foliage, and kept but its ripened berries with the red birds darting
and fluttering around them like so many hiccoughing Comanches about a
dramseller's tent. And here, if one must tell a thing so painful, our
old friend the mocking-bird, neglecting his faithful wife and letting
his home go to decay, kept dropping in, all hours of the day, tasting
the berries' rank pulp, stimulating, stimulating, drowning care, you
know,--"Lost so many children, and the rest gone off in ungrateful
forgetfulness of their old hard-working father; yes;" and ready to
sing or fight, just as any other creature happened not to wish; and
going home in the evening scolding and swaggering, and getting to bed
barely able to hang on to the roost. It would have been bad enough,
even for a man; but for a bird--and a mocking-bird!

But the storm wrought a great change in one small house not in Grande
Pointe, yet of it. Until the storm, ever since the day St. Pierre had
returned from the little railway-station where Claude had taken the
cars, he had seemed as patiently resigned to the new loneliness of
Bayou des Acadiens as his thatched hut, which day by day sat so silent
between the edges of the dark forest and the darker stream, looking
out beyond the farther bank, and far over the green waste of rushes
with its swarms of blackbirds sweeping capriciously now this way and
now that, and the phantom cloud-shadows passing slowly across from one
far line of cypress wood to another. But since that night when the
hut's solitary occupant could not sleep for the winds and for thought
of Claude, there was a great difference inside. And this did not
diminish; it grew. It is hard for a man to be both father and mother,
and at the same time be childless. The bonds of this condition began
slowly to tighten around St. Pierre's heart and then to cut into it.
And so,