nored service; they made him Senator, Governor, President of
Convention, what you will. I have seen the portrait for which he sat
in early manhood to a noted English court painter: dark waving locks;
strong, well-chiselled features; fine clear eyes; an air of warm,
steady-glowing intellectual energy. It hangs still in the home of
which I speak. And I have seen an old ambrotype of him, taken in the
days of this story: hair short-cropped, gray; eyes thoughtful,
courageous; mouth firm, kind, and ready to smile.

It must have been some years before this picture was taken, that, as
he issued from his stately porch,--which the oaks, young then, did not
hide from view as they do now,--coming forth to mount for his regular
morning ride, a weary-faced woman stood before him, holding by the
hand a little toddling boy. She was sick; the child was hungry. He
listened to her tale. Their conversation was in French.

"Widow, are you? And your husband was a Frenchman: yes, I see. Are you
an Acadian? You haven't the accent."

"I am a Creole," she said, with a perceptible flush of resentment. So
that he responded amiably:--

"Yes, and, like all Creoles, proud of it, as you are right to be. But
I am an Acadian of the Acadians, and never wished I was any thing
else."

He found her a haven a good half-day's ride out across the prairies
north-westward, in the home of his long-time acquaintance, Sosthene
Gradnego, who had no more heart than his wife had to say No to either
their eminent friend or a houseless widow; and, as to children, had so
many already, that one more was nothing. They did not feel the burden
of her, she died so soon; but they soon found she had left with them a
positive quantity in her little prattling, restless, high-tempered
Bonaventure. Bonaventure Deschamps: he was just two years younger than
their own little Zosephine.

Sosthene was already a man of some note in this region,--a region
named after a bird. Why would it not often be well so to name
places,--for the bird that most frequents the surrounding woods or
fields? How pleasant to have one's hamlet called Nightingale, or
Whippoorwill, or Goldfinch, or Oriole! The home of Zosephine and
Bonaventure's childhood was in the district known as Carancro; in
bluff English, Carrion Crow.

CHAPTER II.

BONAVENTURE AND ZOSEPHINE.

They did not live _a la chapelle_; that is, in the village of six or
eight houses clustered about the small wooden spire and cr