The River's Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi

tem of engineering, to open it up by a canal which should "span the brake and tap the bayou," so that boats of size and circumstance might enter. Here he would have a launch and

in the annals of local social history as a typical example of affluent ante-bellum hospitality, and is even yet personally recalled by a few old men who s

or their best rooms are let for business purposes-cleared of their cumbersome furnishings of mahogany and rosewo

cemetery-these querulous witnesses to distinction and of permanency are in som

Le Duc" is even yet the Procrustean bed against which they measure

The invitations which were sent out, naming a single date only, with the flattering implication that the visit so urgently desired might never come to an e

watch-tower in the center of its roof, was all upon a single floor and its material the indigenous woods of the forest, yet suffered

country,-its low, spreading form graced the easy eminence upon which it stood, domina

n columns, its four arms afforded as many entrances, of which the southern portal was formal front, from whi

vines, whose gnarled trunks, now woody and strong as trees, topped the balconies, throwing profusions of bloom adown their pillars and along their balustrades. Here Lamarque, Solfate

nywhere, but ostracized through caste exclusion from distinction of place about the home,-lay in heavy tangles in

d spot-had waxed riotous in the license of years of neglect, and throwing off traditions, as many another aristocrat in

ms, stalwart woody growths of lemon-verbena, topping sweet olives and answering the challen

ds upon the trellises and matched pennies with the locust blooms, red petal against white, affiliating,

while the violets, which originally guarded fantastic forms in outlin

es in the locust-trees, with all their fuss and scattering of honey sweets, could not dispel their all-pervading suggestion of romance-the romance of lif

ut an old garden?

not some day wander again in the risen gardens of our childhood, recognizing them by verification of certain familiar faces of flowers who may know us in turn and bloom again-taking up life, which ever includes love and immortality, at t

d here, another there-a seemingly finished

ngs these parts into line will have begun the grea