ven the iniquitous mixture! "_Boir les dames avant!_--Let the
ladies drink first!" Aham! straight from the bottle.

Now, go. The caleche moves. Other caleches bearing parental and
grandparental couples follow. And now the young men and maidens gallop
after; the cavalcade stretches out like the afternoon shadows, and
with shout and song and waving of hats and kerchiefs, away they go!
while from window and door and village street follows the wedding cry:

"_Adjieu, la calege! Adjieu, la calege!_--God speed the wedding pair!"

Coming at first from the villagers, it is continued at length, faint
and far, by the attending cavaliers. As mile by mile they drop aside,
singly or in pairs, toward their homes, they rise in their stirrups,
and lifting high their ribbon-decked hats, they shout and curvette and
curvette and shout until the eye loses them, and the ear can barely
catch the faint farewell:

"_Adjieu, la calege! Adjieu, les mariees!_"

CHAPTER X.

AFTER ALL.

Adieu; but only till the fall of night shall bring the wedding ball.

One little tune--and every Acadian fiddler in Louisiana knows
it--always brings back to Zosephine the opening scene of that festive
and jocund convocation. She sees again the great clean-swept
seed-cotton room of a cotton-gin house belonging to a cousin of the
ex-governor, lighted with many candles stuck into a perfect wealth of
black bottles ranged along the beams of the walls. The fiddler's seat
is mounted on a table in the corner, the fiddler is in it, each beau
has led a maiden into the floor, the sets are made for the
contra-dance, the young men stand expectant, their partners wait with
downcast eyes and mute lips as Acadian damsels should, the music
strikes up, and away they go.

Yes, Zosephine sees the whole bright scene over again whenever that
strain sounds.

[Music]

It was fine from first to last! The ball closed with the bride's
dance. Many a daughter Madame Sosthene had waltzed that farewell
measure with, and now Zosephine was the last. So they danced it, they
two, all the crowd looking on: the one so young and lost in self, the
other so full of years and lost to self; eddying round and round each
other in this last bright embrace before they part, the mother to
swing back into still water, the child to enter the current of a new
life.

And then came the wedding supper! At one end of the long table the
bride and groom sat side by side, and at their left and rig