and reducing the flames of the old feud, rekindled by the Fusilier-Nancanou duel, to a little foul smoke.  The main difficulty seemed to be that Honore could not be satisfied with a clean conscience as to his own deeds and the peace and fellowships of single households; his longing was, and had ever been—­he had inherited it from his father—­to see one unbroken and harmonious Grandissime family gathering yearly under this venerated roof without reproach before all persons, classes, and races with whom they had ever had to do.  It was not hard for the old mansion to forgive him once or twice; but she had had to do it often.  It seems no over-stretch of fancy to say she sometimes gazed down upon his erring ways with a look of patient sadness in her large and beautiful windows.

And how had that forbearance been rewarded?  Take one short instance:  when, seven years before this present fete de grandpere, he came back from Europe, and she (this old home which we cannot help but personify), though in trouble then—­a trouble that sent up the old feud flames again—­opened her halls to rejoice in him with the joy of all her gathered families, he presently said such strange things in favor of indiscriminate human freedom that for very shame’s sake she hushed them up, in the fond hope that he would outgrow such heresies.  But he?  On top of all the rest, he declined a military commission and engaged in commerce—­“shopkeeping, parbleu!”

However, therein was developed a grain of consolation.  Honore became—­as he chose to call it—­more prudent.  With much tact, Agricola was amiably crowded off the dictator’s chair, to become, instead, a sort of seneschal.  For a time the family peace was perfect, and Honore, by a touch here to-day and a word there to-morrow, was ever lifting the name, and all who bore it, a little and a little higher; when suddenly, as in his father’s day—­that dear Numa who knew how to sacrifice his very soul, as a sort of Iphigenia for the propitiation of the family gods—­as in Numa’s day came the cession to Spain, so now fell this other cession, like an unexpected tornado, threatening the wreck of her children’s slave-schooners and the prostration alike of their slave-made crops and their Spanish liberties; and just in the fateful moment where Numa would have stood by her, Honore had let go.  Ah, it was bitter!

“See what foreign education does!” cried a Mandarin de Grandissime of the Baton Rouge Coast.  “I am sorry now”—­derisively—­“that I never sent my boy to France, am I not?  No!  No-o-o!  I would rather my son should never know how to read, than that he should come back from Paris repudiating the sentiments and prejudices of his own father.  Is education better than family peace?  Ah, bah!  My son make friends with Americains and tell me they—­that call a negro ’monsieur’—­are as good as his father?  But that is what we get for letting Honore become a merchant.  Ha! the degradation!  Shaking hands with men who do not believe in the slave trade!  Shake hands?  Yes; associate—­fraternize! with apothecaries and negrophiles.  And now we are invited to meet at the fete de grandpere, in the house where he is really the chief—­the cacique!”