is in the better one which awaits us: and that our trials in this, our initiatory state of terrestrial existence, are merely intended by the infinite goodness of the Creator, as golden opportunities for us to show our fidelity, and to deserve a higher or lesser degree of happiness, when we shall enter into the celestial kingdom of spiritual and eternal life, secured to us at the price of sufferings alone: and what sufferings! Those of the Godhead himself! He would not then have repined at pursuing the thorny path, trod before, for his sake, by the divine Victim, and with Job, he would have said: "Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!" I lately stood where the first establishment of the French was made, and I saw no vestiges of their passage, save in the middle of the space formerly occupied by the fort, where I discovered a laying of bricks on a level with the ground, and covering the common area of a tomb. Is it the repository of Sauvolle's remains? I had with me no pickaxe to solve the question, and indeed, it was more agreeable to the mood in which I was then, to indulge in speculations, than to ascertain the truth. Since the fort had been abandoned, it was evident that there never had been any attempt to turn the ground to some useful purpose, although, being cleared of trees, it must have been more eligible for a settlement than the adjoining ground which remained covered with wood. Yet, on the right and left, beyond the two ravines already mentioned, habitations are to be seen; but a sort of traditionary awe seems to have repelled intrusion from the spot marked by such melancholy recollections. On the right, as you approach the place, a beautiful villa, occupied by an Anglo-American family, is replete with all the comforts and resources of modern civilization; while on the left, there may be seen a rude hut, where still reside descendants from the first settlers, living in primitive ignorance and irreclaimable poverty, which lose, however, their offensive features, by being mixed up with so much of patriarchal virtues, of pristine innocence, and of arcadian felicity. Those two families, separated only by the site of the old fort, but between whose social position there existed such an immense distance, struck me as being fit representatives of the past and of the present. One was the type of the French colony, and the other, the emblem of its modern transformation. I gazed with indescribable feelings on the spot where Sauvolle and his companions had suffered so much. Humble and abandoned as it is, it was clothed in my eye with a sacred character, when I remem bered that it was the cradle of so many sovereign states, which are but disjecta membra of the old colony of Louisiana. What a contrast between the French colony of 1700, and its imperial substitute of 1848! Is there in the mythological records of antiquity, or in the fairy tales of the Arabian Nights, any thing that will not sink into insignificance, when compared with the romance of such a history? |