808 At Four O'Clock in the Morning, Olive 728 836 Austen, Miss, and Miss Ferrier, Charles miral The Earl of St. Vincent; Cola Di Freeman, Edward Augustus, John Fiske Future of Local Libraries, The, Justin Genius, Ancestry of, Havelock Ellis Hazlitt, William, Unpublished Correspon- Heartleaf from Stony Creek Bottom, A, History. See Feudal Chiefs of Acadia; Holiday Books, Some Iceland, Books and Reading in, William Iliad, Womanhood in the, William Cran- Immigration. See European Peasants as In a Wintry Wilderness, Frank Bolles PAGE 815 383 675 818 443 57 Marine Observatory, The Prime Need of American Biology, A, C. O. Whitman Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier, Charles 808 836 Nature. See American Out of Doors, The; At Four O'Clock in the Morning; Betwixt a Smile and Tear; In A Wintry Wil- 332 Of A Dancing Girl, Lafcadio Hearn 332 626 33 Old Kaskaskia, Mary Hartwell Catherwood Educational Trend of the Northwest, The, 1, 145, 289, 433 832 Emerson, Random Reminiscences of, Wil- 344 English Family in the Seventeenth Cen 371 English Question, The, James Jay Green- ough 656 Ennui, Agnes Repplier 775 European Peasants as Immigrants, N. S. 646 Ferrier, Miss Austen and Miss, Charles Townsend Copeland 836 ATLANTIC MONTHLY: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics. VOL. LXXI.-—JANUARY, 1893. — No. CCCCXXIII. OLD KASKASKIA. IN FOUR PARTS. THE BONFIRE OF ST. JOHN. EARLY in the century, on a summer evening, Jean Lozier stood on the bluff looking at Kaskaskia. He loved it with the homesick longing of one who is born for towns and condemned to the fields. Moses looking into the promised land had such visions and ideals as this old lad cherished. Jean was old in feeling, though not yet out of his teens. The training-masters of life had got him early, and found under his red sunburn and knobby joints, his black eyes and bushy eyebrows, the nature that passionately aspires. The town of Kaskaskia was his sweetheart. It tantalized him with advantage and growth while he had to turn the clods of the upland. The long peninsula on which Kaskaskia stood, between the Okaw and the Mississippi rivers, lay below him in the glory of sunset. Southward to the point spread lands owned by the parish, and known as the common pasture. Jean could see the church of the Immaculate Conception and the tower built for its ancient bell, the convent northward, and all the pleasant streets bowered in trees. The wharf was crowded with vessels from New Orleans and Cahokia, and the arched stone bridge across the Okaw was a thoroughfare of hurrying carriages. The road at the foot of the bluff, more than a hundred feet below Jean, showed its white flint belt in distant laps and PART FIRST. stretches through northern foliage. It led to the territorial governor's countryseat of Elvirade; thence to Fort Chartres and Prairie du Rocher; so on to Cahokia, where it met the great trails of the far north. The road also swarmed with carriages and riders on horses, all moving toward Colonel Pierre Menard's house. Jean could not see his seignior's chimneys for the trees and the dismantled and deserted earth-works of Fort Gage. The fort had once protected Kaskaskia, but in these early peaceful times of the Illinois Territory it no longer maintained a garrison. The lad guessed what was going on: those happy Kaskaskians, the fine world, were having a ball at Colonel Menard's. Summer and winter they danced, they made fêtes, they enjoyed life. When the territorial Assembly met in this capital of the West, he had often frosted himself late into the winter night, watching the lights and listening to the music in Kaskaskia. Jean Lozier knew every bit of its history. The parish priest, Father Olivier, who came to hear him confess because he could not leave his grandfather, had told it to him. There was a record book transmitted from priest to priest from the earliest settlement of Cascasquia of the Illinois. Jean loved the story of young D'Artaguette, whom the boatmen yet celebrated in song. On moonlight nights, when the Mississippi showed its broad sheet four miles away across the level plain, he sometimes fooled himself with thinking he could see the fleet of young soldiers passing down the river, bearing the French flag; phantoms proceeding again to their tragedy and the Indian stake. He admired the seat where his seignior lived in comfort and great hospitality, but all the crowds pressing to Pierre Menard's house seemed to him to have less wisdom than the single man who met and passed them and crossed the bridge into Kaskaskia. The vesper bell rung, breaking its music in echoes against the sandstone bosom of the bluff. Red splendors faded from the sky, leaving a pearl-gray bank heaped over the farther river. Still Jean watched Kaskaskia. "But the glory remains when the light fades away, its day's end. The crack of long whips could be heard, flourished over oxen yoked by the horns, or three or four ponies hitched tandem, all driven without reins, and drawing huge bales of merchandise. Few of the houses were more than one story high, but they had a sumptuous spread, each in its own square of lawn, orchard, and garden. They were built of stone, or of timbers filled in with stone and mortar. The rider turned several corners, and stopped in front of a small house which displayed the wares of a penny-trader in its window. From the open one of the two front doors a black boy came directly out to take the bridle; and behind him skipped a wiry shaven person, whose sleek crown was partly covered by a Madras handhe sung to himself. He had caught the kerchief, the common head-gear of humline from some English boatmen. ble Kaskaskians. His feet clogged their lightness with a pair of the wooden shoes manufactured for slaves. A sleeved blanket, made with a hood which lay back on his shoulders, almost covered him, and was girdled at the waist by a knotted cord. "Ye dog, ye dog, where are you, ye dog?" called a voice from the woods behind him. "Here, grandfather," answered Jean, starting like a whipped dog. He took his red cap from under his arm, sighing, and slouched away from the bluff edge, the coarse homespun which he wore revealing knots and joints in his workhardened frame. "Ye dog, am I to have my supper tonight?" "Yes, grandfather." "Here I am again, Father Baby," hailed the rider, alighting. "Welcome home, doctor. What news from Fort Chartres?" "No news. My friend the surgeon is doing well. He need not have sent for me; but your carving doctor is a great coward when it comes to physicking himself." They entered the shop, while the slave led the horse away; and no customers demanding the trading friar's attention, he followed his lodger to an inuer room, having first lighted candles in his wooden sconces. Their yellow lustre showed the tidiness of the shop, and the penny But Jean took one more look at the capital of his love, which he had never entered, and for which he was unceasingly homesick. The governor's carriage dashed along the road beneath him, with a military escort from Fort Chartres. He felt no envy of such state. He would have used the carriage to cross the bridge. "If I but lived in Kaskaskia!" whis- merchandise arranged on shelves with pered Jean. The man on horseback, who met and passed the ball-goers, rode through Kaskaskia's twinkling streets in the pleasant glow of twilight. Trade had not reached that exactness which has been thought peculiar to unmarried women. Father Baby was a scandal to the established confessor of the parish, and the joke of the ungodly. Some said he had been a |