t is
true, and sometimes sad; yet so well poised, so concentrated, so equal
to every passing day and hour!--she to seem--in this letter--far out
of her course, adrift, and mutely and dimly signalling for aid! The
daughter read the pages again and again. What could they mean? Here,
for instance, this line about the mother's coming herself to the city,
if, and if, and if!

The letter found Marguerite in the bosom of a family that dwelt in the
old Rue Bourbon, only a short way below Canal Street, the city's
centre. The house stands on the street, its drawing-room windows
opening upon the sidewalk, and a narrow balcony on the story above
shading them scantily at noon. A garden on the side is visible from
the street through a lofty, black, wrought-iron fence. Of the details
within the enclosure, I remember best the vines climbing the walls of
the tall buildings that shut it in, and the urns and vases, and the
evergreen foliage of the Japan plum-trees. A little way off, and
across the street, was the pleasant restaurant and salesroom of the
Christian Women's Exchange.

The family spoke English. Indeed, they spoke it a great deal; and
French--also a great deal. The younger generation, two daughters and a
son, went much into society. Their name was that of an ancient French
noble house, with which, in fact, they had no connection. They took
great pains to call themselves Creoles, though they knew well enough
they were Acadians. The Acadian caterpillar often turns into a Creole
butterfly. Their great-grandfather, one of the children of the
Nova-Scotian deportation, had been a tobacco-farmer on the old Cote
Acadien in St. John the Baptist parish. Lake des Allemands lay there,
just behind him. In 1815, his son, their grandfather, in an excursion
through the lake and bayou beyond, discovered, far south-eastward in
the midst of the Grande Prairie des Allemands, a "pointe" of several
hundred acres extent. Here, with one or two others, he founded the
Acadian settlement of "La Vacherie," and began to build a modest
fortune. The blood was good, even though it was not the blood of
ancient robbers; and the son in the next generation found his way, by
natural and easy stages, through Barataria and into the city, and
became the "merchant" of his many sugar and rice planting kinsmen and
neighbors.

It was a great favor to Marguerite to be taken into such a household
as this. She felt it so. The household felt it so. Yet almost from the