though I be"--cried Jones.

"_Amen!_" reiterated the negro.

"A-a-amen!" said Parson Jones.

He rose to his feet, and, stooping to take up his hat, beheld the
well-known roll. As one stunned, he gazed for a moment upon his slave,
who still knelt with clasped hands and rolling eyeballs; but when he
became aware of the laughter and cheers that greeted him from both deck
and shore, he lifted eyes and hands to heaven, and cried like the
veriest babe. And when he looked at the roll again, and hugged and
kissed it, St.-Ange tried to raise a second shout, but choked, and the
crew fell to their poles.

And now up runs Baptiste, covered with slime, and prepares to cast his
projectiles. The first one fell wide of the mark; the schooner swung
round into a long reach of water, where the breeze was in her favor;
another shout of laughter drowned the maledictions of the muddy man; the
sails filled; Colossus of Rhodes, smiling and bowing as hero of the
moment, ducked as the main boom swept round, and the schooner, leaning
slightly to the pleasant influence, rustled a moment over the bulrushes,
and then sped far away down the rippling bayou.

M. Jules St.-Ange stood long, gazing at the receding vessel as it now
disappeared, now re-appeared beyond the tops of the high undergrowth;
but, when an arm of the forest hid it finally from sight, he turned
townward, followed by that fagged-out spaniel, his servant, saying, as
he turned, "Baptiste."

"_Miche?_"

"You know w'at I goin' do wid dis money?"

"_Non, m'sieur._"

"Well, you can strike me dead if I don't goin' to pay hall my debts!
_Allons!_"

He began a merry little song to the effect that his sweetheart was a
wine-bottle, and master and man, leaving care behind, returned to the
picturesque Rue Royale. The ways of Providence are indeed strange. In
all Parson Jones's after-life, amid the many painful reminiscences of
his visit to the City of the Plain, the sweet knowledge was withheld
from him that by the light of the Christian virtue that shone from him
even in his great fall, Jules St.-Ange arose, and went to his father an
honest man.

JEAN-AH POQUELIN.

In the first decade of the present century, when the newly established
American Government was the most hateful thing in Louisiana--when the
Creoles were still kicking at such vile innovations as the trial by
jury, American dances, anti-smuggling laws, and the printing of the
Governor's proclamation in Englis