Balcony Stories

"I tell you, I rose from that bed—naturally I had thrown myself upon it. Quick I washed my face, I brushed my hair, and, you see these bows of ribbons,—look, here are the marks of the tears,—I turned them. Hé, Loulou, it occurs to me, that if you examined the blue bows on a bride's negligée, you might always find tears on the other side; for do they not all have to marry whom God sends? and am I the only one who had dreams? It is the end of dreams, marriage; and that is the good thing about it. God lets us dream to keep us quiet, but he knows when to wake us up, I tell you. The blue bows knew! And now, you see, I prefer my husband to my brun; in fact, Loulou, I adore him, and I am furiously jealous about him. And he is so good to Clementine and the poor little children; and see his photograph—a blond, and not good-looking, and small!

But poor papa! If he had been alive, I am sure he never would have agreed with God about my marriage."

THE MIRACLE CHAPEL

Every heart has a miracle to pray for. Every life holds that which only a miracle can cure. To prove that there have never been, that there can never be, miracles does not alter the matter. So long as there is something hoped for,—that does not come in the legitimate channel of possible events,—so long as something does come not to be hoped or expected in the legitimate channel of possible events, just so long will the miracle be prayed for.

The rich and the prosperous, it would seem, do not depend upon God so much, do not need miracles, as the poor do. They do not have to pray for the extra crust when starvation hovers near; for the softening of an obdurate landlord's heart; for strength in temptation, light in darkness, salvation from vice; for a friend in friendlessness; for that miracle of miracles, an opportunity to struggling ambition; for the ending of a dark night, the breaking of day; and, oh! for God's own miracle to the bedside-watchers—the change for the better, when death is there and the apothecary's skill too far, far away. The poor, the miserable, the unhappy, they can show their miracles by the score; that is why God is called the poor man's friend. He does not mind, so they say, going in the face of logic and reason to relieve them; for often the kind and charitable are sadly hampered by the fetters of logic and reason, which hold them, as it were, away from their own benevolence.

But the rich have their miracles, no doubt, even in that beautiful empyrean of moneyed ease in which the poor place them. Their money cannot buy all they enjoy, and God knows how much of their sorrow it assuages. As it is, one hears now and then of accidents among them, conversions to better thoughts, warding off of danger, rescue of life; and heirs are sometimes born, and husbands provided, and fortunes saved, in such surprising ways, that even the rich, feeling their limitations in spite of their money, must ascribe it privately if not publicly to other potencies than their own. These cathedral tours de force, however, do not, if the truth be told, convince like the miracles of the obscure little chapel.

There is always a more and a most obscure little miracle chapel, and as faith seems ever to lead unhesitatingly to the latter one, there is ever rising out of humility and obscurity, as in response to a demand, some new shrine, to replace the wear and tear and loss of other shrines by prosperity. For, alas! it is hard even for a chapel to remain obscure and humble in the face of prosperity and popularity. And how to prevent such popularity and prosperity? As soon as the noise of a real miracle in it gets abroad, every one is for hurrying thither at once with their needs and their prayers, their candles and their picayunes; and the little miracle chapel, perhaps despite itself, becomes with mushroom growth a church, and the church a cathedral, from whose resplendent altars the cheap, humble ex-voto tablets, the modest beginnings of its ecclesiastical fortunes, are before long banished to dimly lighted lateral shrines.

The miracle chapel in question lay at the end of a very confusing but still intelligible route. It is not in truth a chapel at all, but a consecrated chamber in a very small, very lowly cottage, which stands, or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside were miracles themselves in that, with their liquid contents, they were streets and not bayous. However, they protected their island chapel almost as well as a six-foot moat could have done. There was a small paved space on the sidewalk that served to the pedestrian as an indication of the spot in the tall, long, broad fence where a gate might be sought. It was a small gate with a strong latch. It required a strong hand to open it. At the sound of the click it made, the little street ragamuffin, who stood near, peeping through the fence, looked up. He had worked quite a hole between the boards with his fingers. Such an anxious expression passed over his face that even a casual passer-by could not help relieving it by a question—any question:

"Is this the miracle chapel, little boy?"

"Yes, ma'am; yes." Then his expression changed to one of eagerness, yet hardly less anxious.

"Here. Take this—"

He did not hold out his hand, the coin had to seek it. At its touch he refused to take it.

"I ain't begging."

"What are you looking at so through the fence?" He was all sadness now.

"Just looking."

"Is there anything to see inside?"

He did not answer. The interrogation was repeated.

"I can't see nothing. I'm blind," putting his eyes again to the hole, first one, then the other.

"Come, won't you tell me how this came to be a miracle chapel?"

"Oh, ma'am,"—he turned his face from the fence, and clasped his hands in excitement,—"it was a poor widow woman who come here with her baby that was a-dying, and she prayed to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary made the baby live—"

He dropped his voice, the words falling slower and slower. As he raised his face, one could see then that he was blind, and the accident that had happened to him, in fording the street. What sightless eyes! What a wet, muddy little skeleton! Ten? No; hardly ten years of age.

"The widow woman she picked up her baby, and she run down the walk here, and out into the street screaming—she was so glad,"—putting his eyes to the peep-hole again,—"and the Virgin Mary come down the walk after her, and come through the gate, too; and that was all she seed—the widow woman."

"Did you know the widow woman?"

He shook his head.

"How do you know it?"

"That was what they told me. And they told me, the birds all begun to sing at once, and the flowers all lighted up like the sun was shining on them. They seed her. And she come down the walk, and through the gate," his voice lowering again to a whisper.

Aye, how the birds must have sung, and the flowers shone, to the widowed mother as she ran, nay, leaped, down that rose-hedged walk, with her restored baby clasped to her bosom!

"They seed her," repeated the little fellow. "And that is why you stand here—to see her, too?"

His shoulder turned uneasily in the clasp upon it.

"They seed her, and they ain't got no eyes."

"Have you no mother?"

"Ain't never had no mother." A thought struck him. "Would that count, ma'am? Would that count? The little baby that was dying—yes, ma'am, it had a mother; and it's the mothers that come here constant with their children; I sometimes hear 'em dragging them in by the hand."

"How long have you been coming here?"

"Ever since the first time I heard it, ma'am."

Street ragamuffins do not cry: it would be better if they did so, when they are so young and so blind; it would be easier for the spectator, the auditor.

"They seed her—I might see her ef—ef I could see her once—ef—ef I could see anything once." His voice faltered; but he stiffened it instantly. "She might see me. She can't pass through this gate without seeing me; and—and—ef she seed me—and I didn't even see her—oh, I'm so tired of being blind!"

"Did you never go inside to pray?" How embarrassing such a question is, even to a child!

"No, ma'am. Does that count, too? The little baby didn't pray, the flowers didn't go inside, nor the birds. And they say the birds broke out singing all at once, and the flowers shined, like the sun was shining on 'em—like the sun was shining in 'em," he corrected himself. "The birds they can see, and the flowers they can't see, and they seed her." He shivered with the damp cold—and perhaps too with hunger.

"Where do you live?"

He wouldn't answer.

"What do you live on?"

He shook his head.

"Come with me." He could not resist the grasp on his shoulder, and the firm directing of his bare, muddy feet through the gate, up the walk, and into the chamber which the Virgin found that day. He was turned to the altar, and pressed down on his knees.

One should not look at the face of a blind child praying to the Virgin for sight. Only the Virgin herself should see that—and if she once saw that little boy! There were hearts, feet, hands, and eyes enough hanging around to warrant hope at least, if not faith; the effigies of the human aches and pains that had here found relief, if not surcease; feet and hands beholden to no physician for their exorcism of rheumatism; eyes and ears indebted to no oculist or aurist; and the hearts,—they are always in excess,—and, to the most skeptical, there is something sweetly comforting in the sight of so many cured hearts, with their thanks cut deep, as they should be, in the very marble thereof. Where the bed must have stood was the altar, rising by easy gradations, brave in ecclesiastical deckings, to the plaster figure of her whom those yearning hearts were seeing, whom those murmuring lips were addressing. Hearts must be all alike to her at such a distance, but the faces to the looker-on were so different. The eyes straining to look through all the experiences and troubles that their life has held to plead, as only eyes can plead, to one who can, if she will, perform their miracle for them. And the mouths,—the sensitive human mouths,—each one distorted by the tragedy against which it was praying.

Their miracles! their miracles! what trifles to divinity! Perhaps hardly more to humanity! How far a simple looker-on could supply them if so minded! Perhaps a liberal exercise of love and charity by not more than half a dozen well-to-do people could answer every prayer in the room! But what a miracle that would be, and how the Virgin's heart would gladden thereat, and jubilate over her restored heart-dying children, even as the widowed mother did over her one dying babe!

And the little boy had stopped praying. The futility of it—perhaps his own impotence—had overcome him. He was crying, and past the shame of showing it—crying helplessly, hopelessly. Tears were rolling out of his sightless eyes over his wordless lips. He could not pray; he could only cry. What better, after all, can any of us do? But what a prayer to a woman—to even the plaster figure of a woman! And the Virgin did hear him; for she had him taken without loss of a moment to the hospital, and how easy she made it for the physician to remove the disability! To her be the credit.

THE STORY OF A DAY

It is really not much, the story; it is only the arrangement of it, as we would say of our dresses and our drawing-rooms.

It began with the dawn, of course; and the skiff for our voyage, silvered with dew, waiting in the mist for us, as if it had floated down in a cloud from heaven to the bayou. When repeated, this sounds like poor poetry; but that is the way one thinks at day dawn, when the dew is yet, as it were, upon our brains, and our ideas are still half dreams, and our waking hearts, alas! as innocent as waking babies playing with their toes.

Our oars waked the waters of the bayou, as motionless as a sleeping snake under its misty covert—to continue the poetical language or thought. The ripples ran frightened and shivering into the rooty thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where, without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much like women mothers!

It soon became day enough for the mist to rise. The eyes that saw it ought to be able to speak to tell fittingly about it.

Not all at once, nor all together, but a thinning, a lifting, a breaking, a wearing away; a little withdrawing here, a little withdrawing there; and now a peep, and now a peep; a bride lifting her veil to her husband! Blue! White! Lilies! Blue lilies! White lilies! Blue and white lilies! And still blue and white lilies! And still! And still! Wherever the veil lifted, still and always the bride!

Not in clumps and bunches, not in spots and patches, not in banks, meadows, acres, but in—yes; for still it lifted beyond and beyond and beyond; the eye could not touch the limit of them, for the eye can touch only the limit of vision; and the lilies filled the whole sea-marsh, for that is the way spring comes to the sea-marshes.

The sedge-roots might have been unsightly along the water's edge, but there were morning-glories, all colors, all shades—oh, such morning-glories as we of the city never see! Our city morning-glories must dream of them, as we dream of angels. Only God could be so lavish! Dropping from the tall spear-heads to the water, into the water, under the water. And then, the reflection of them, in all their colors, blue, white, pink, purple, red, rose, violet!

To think of an obscure little Acadian bayou waking to flow the first thing in the morning not only through banks of new-blown morning-glories, but sown also to its depths with such reflections as must make it think itself a bayou in heaven, instead of in Paroisse St. Martin. Perhaps that is the reason the poor poets think themselves poets, on account of the beautiful things that are only reflected into their minds from what is above? Besides the reflections, there were alligators in the bayou, trying to slip away before we could see them, and watching us with their stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under the thickest, prettiest flowery bowers; and turtles splashing into the water ahead of us; and fish (silver-sided perch), looking like reflections themselves, floating through the flower reflections, nibbling their breakfast.

Our bayou had been running through swamp only a little more solid than itself; in fact, there was no solidity but what came from the roots of grasses. Now, the banks began to get firmer, from real soil in them. We could see cattle in the distance, up to their necks in the lilies, their heads and sharp-pointed horns coming up and going down in the blue and white. Nothing makes cattle's heads appear handsomer, with the sun just rising far, far away on the other side of them. The sea-marsh cattle turned loose to pasture in the lush spring beauty—turned loose in Elysium!

But the land was only partly land yet, and the cattle still cattle to us. The rising sun made revelations, as our bayou carried us through a drove in their Elysium, or it might have always been an Elysium to us. It was not all pasturage, all enjoyment. The rising and falling feeding head was entirely different, as we could now see, from the rising and falling agonized head of the bogged—the buried alive. It is well that the lilies grow taller and thicker over the more treacherous places; but, misery! misery! not much of the process was concealed from us, for the cattle have to come to the bayou for water. Such a splendid black head that had just yielded breath! The wide-spreading ebony horns thrown back among the morning-glories, the mouth open from the last sigh, the glassy eyes staring straight at the beautiful blue sky above, where a ghostly moon still lingered, the velvet neck ridged with veins and muscles, the body already buried in black ooze. And such a pretty red-and-white-spotted heifer, lying on her side, opening and shutting her eyes, breathing softly in meek resignation to her horrible calamity! And, again, another one was plunging and battling in the act of realizing her doom: a fierce, furious, red cow, glaring and bellowing at the soft, yielding inexorable abysm under her, the bustards settling afar off, and her own species browsing securely just out of reach.

They understand that much, the sea-marsh cattle, to keep out of reach of the dead combatant. In the delirium of anguish, relief cannot be distinguished from attack, and rescue of the victim has been proved to mean goring of the rescuer.

The bayou turned from it at last, from our beautiful lily world about which our pleasant thoughts had ceased to flow even in bad poetry.

Our voyage was for information, which might be obtained at a certain habitation; if not there, at a second one, or surely at a third and most distant settlement.

The bayou narrowed into a canal, then widened into a bayou again, and the low, level swamp and prairie advanced into woodland and forest. Oak-trees began, our beautiful oak-trees! Great branches bent down almost to the water,—quite even with high water,—covered with forests of oak, parasites, lichens, and with vines that swept our heads as we passed under them, drooping now and then to trail in the water, a plaything for the fishes, and a landing-place for amphibious insects. The sun speckled the water with its flickering patterns, showering us with light and heat. We have no spring suns; our sun, even in December, is a summer one.

And so, with all its grace of curve and bend, and so—the description is longer than the voyage—we come to our first stopping-place. To the side, in front of the well-kept fertile fields, like a proud little showman, stood the little house. Its pointed shingle roof covered it like the top of a chafing-dish, reaching down to the windows, which peeped out from under it like little eyes.

A woman came out of the door to meet us. She had had time during our graceful winding approach to prepare for us. What an irrevocable vow to old maidenhood! At least twenty-five, almost a possible grandmother, according to Acadian computation, and well in the grip of advancing years. She was dressed in a stiff, dark red calico gown, with a white apron. Her black hair, smooth and glossy under a varnish of grease, was plaited high in the back, and dropped regular ringlets, six in all, over her forehead. That was the epoch when her calamity came to her, when the hair was worn in that fashion. A woman seldom alters her coiffure after a calamity of a certain nature happens to her. The figure had taken a compact rigidity, an unfaltering inflexibility, all the world away from the elasticity of matronhood; and her eyes were clear and fixed like her figure, neither falling, nor rising, nor puzzling under other eyes. Her lips, her hands, her slim feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their intent, neither reaching, nor feeling, nor running for those other lips, hands, and feet which should have doubled their single life.

That was Adorine Mérionaux, otherwise the most industrious Acadian and the best cottonade-weaver in the parish. It had been short, her story. A woman's love is still with those people her story. She was thirteen when she met him. That is the age for an Acadian girl to meet him, because, you know, the large families—the thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, twenty children—take up the years; and when one wishes to know one's great-great-grandchildren (which is the dream of the Acadian girl) one must not delay one's story.

She had one month to love him in, and in one week they were to have the wedding. The Acadians believe that marriage must come au point, as cooks say their sauces must be served. Standing on the bayou-bank in front of the Mérionaux, one could say "Good day" with the eyes to the Zévérin Theriots—that was the name of the parents of the young bridegroom. Looking under the branches of the oaks, one could see across the prairie,—prairie and sea-marsh it was,—and clearly distinguish another little red-washed house like the Mérionaux, with a painted roof hanging over the windows, and a staircase going up outside to the garret. With the sun shining in the proper direction, one might distinguish more, and with love shining like the sun in the eyes, one might see, one might see—a heart full.

It was only the eyes, however, which could make such a quick voyage to the Zévérin Theriots; a skiff had a long day's journey to reach them. The bayou sauntered along over the country like a negro on a Sunday's pleasuring, trusting to God for time, and to the devil for means.

Oh, nothing can travel quickly over a bayou! Ask any one who has waited on a bayou-bank for a physician or a life-and-death message. Thought refuses to travel and turn and double over it; thought, like the eye, takes the shortest cut—straight over the sea-marsh; and in the spring of the year, when the lilies are in bloom, thought could not take a more heavenly way, even from beloved to beloved.

It was the week before marriage, that week when, more than one's whole life afterward, one's heart feels most longing—most—well, in fact, it was the week before marriage. From Sunday to Sunday, that was all the time to be passed. Adorine—women live through this week by the grace of God, or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as the men—Adorine could look across the prairie to the little red roof during the day, and could think across it during the night, and get up before day to look across again—longing, longing all the time. Of course one must supply all this from one's own imagination or experience.

But Adorine could sing, and she sang. One might hear, in a favorable wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other, so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of her looking and thinking and longing.

When one loves, it is as if everything was known of and seen by the other; not only all that passes in the head and heart, which would in all conscience be more than enough to occupy the other, but the talking, the dressing, the conduct. It was then that the back hair was braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like that of a woman in love.

It was her singing, however, which most showed that other existence in her existence. When she sang at her spinning-wheel or her loom, or knelt battling clothes on the bank of the bayou, her lips would kiss out the words, and the tune would rise and fall and tremble, as if Zepherin were just across there, anywhere; in fact, as if every blue and white lily might hide an ear of him.

It was the time of the new moon, fortunately, when all sit up late in the country. The family would stop in their talking about the wedding to listen to her. She did not know it herself, but it—the singing—was getting louder and clearer, and, poor little thing, it told everything. And after the family went to bed they could still hear her, sitting on the bank of the bayou, or up in her window, singing and looking at the moon traveling across the lily prairie—for all its beauty and brightness no more beautiful and bright than a heart in love.

It was just past the middle of the week, a Thursday night. The moon was so bright the colors of the lilies could be seen, and the singing, so sweet, so far-reaching—it was the essence of the longing of love. Then it was that the miracle happened to her. Miracles are always happening to the Acadians. She could not sleep, she could not stay in bed. Her heart drove her to the window, and kept her there, and—among the civilized it could not take place, but here she could sing as she pleased in the middle of the night; it was nobody's affair, nobody's disturbance. "Saint Ann! Saint Joseph! Saint Mary!" She heard her song answered! She held her heart, she bent forward, she sang again. Oh, the air was full of music! It was all music! She fell on her knees; she listened, looking at the moon; and, with her face in her hands, looking at Zepherin. It was God's choir of angels, she thought, and one with a voice like Zepherin! Whenever it died away she would sing again, and again, and again—

But the sun came, and the sun is not created, like the moon, for lovers, and whatever happened in the night, there was work to be done in the day. Adorine worked like one in a trance, her face as radiant as the upturned face of a saint. They did not know what it was, or rather they thought it was love. Love is so different out there, they make all kinds of allowances for it. But, in truth, Adorine was still hearing her celestial voices or voice. If the cackling of the chickens, the whir of the spinning-wheel, or the "bum bum" of the loom effaced it a moment, she had only to go to some still place, round her hand over her ear, and give the line of a song, and—it was Zepherin—Zepherin she heard.

She walked in a dream until night. When the moon came up she was at the window, and still it continued, so faint, so sweet, that answer to her song. Echo never did anything more exquisite, but she knew nothing of such a heathen as Echo. Human nature became exhausted. She fell asleep where she was, in the window, and dreamed as only a bride can dream of her groom. When she awoke, "Adorine! Adorine!" the beautiful angel voices called to her; "Zepherin! Zepherin!" she answered, as if she, too, were an angel, signaling another angel in heaven. It was too much. She wept, and that broke the charm. She could hear nothing more after that. All that day was despondency, dejection, tear-bedewed eyes, and tremulous lips, the commonplace reaction, as all know, of love exaltation. Adorine's family, Acadian peasants though they were, knew as much about it as any one else, and all that any one knows about it is that marriage is the cure-all, and the only cure-all, for love.

And Zepherin? A man could better describe his side of that week; for it, too, has mostly to be described from imagination or experience. What is inferred is that what Adorine longed and thought and looked in silence and resignation, according to woman's way, he suffered equally, but in a man's way, which is not one of silence or resignation,—at least when one is a man of eighteen,—the last interview, the near wedding, her beauty, his love, her house in sight, the full moon, the long, wakeful nights.

He took his pirogue; but the bayou played with his impatience, maddened his passion, bringing him so near, to meander with him again so far away. There was only a short prairie between him and ——, a prairie thick with lily-roots—one could almost walk over their heads, so close, and gleaming in the moonlight. But this is all only inference.

The pirogue was found tethered to the paddle stuck upright in the soft bank, and—Adorine's parents related the rest. Nothing else was found until the summer drought had bared the swamp.

There was a little girl in the house when we arrived—all else were in the field—a stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a brother. How she kept away from Adorine, and how much that testified!

It would have been too painful. The little arms around her neck, the head nestling to her bosom, sleepily pressing against it. And the little one might ask to be sung to sleep. Sung to sleep!

The little bed-chamber, with its high mattressed bed, covered with the Acadian home-spun quilt, trimmed with netting fringe, its bit of mirror over the bureau, the bottle of perfumed grease to keep the locks black and glossy, the prayer-beads and blessed palms hanging on the wall, the low, black polished spinning-wheel, the loom,—the métier d' Adorine famed throughout the parish,—the ever goodly store of cotton and yarn hanks swinging from the ceiling, and the little square, open window which looked under the mossy oak-branches to look over the prairie; and once again all blue and white lilies—they were all there, as Adorine was there; but there was more—not there.

ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE

Old Jeanne Marie leaned her hand against the house, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She had not wept since she buried her last child. With her it was one trouble, one weeping, no more; and her wrinkled, hard, polished skin so far had known only the tears that come after death. The trouble in her heart now was almost exactly like the trouble caused by death; although she knew it was not so bad as death, yet, when she thought of this to console herself, the tears rolled all the faster. She took the end of the red cotton kerchief tied over her head, and wiped them away; for the furrows in her face did not merely run up and down—they ran in all directions, and carried her tears all over her face at once. She could understand death, but she could not understand this.

It came about in this way: Anne Marie and she lived in the little red-washed cabin against which she leaned; had lived there alone with each other for fifty years, ever since Jeanne Marie's husband had died, and the three children after him, in the fever epidemic.

The little two-roomed cabin, the stable where there used to be a cow, the patch of ground planted with onions, had all been bought and paid for by the husband; for he was a thrifty, hard-working Gascon, and had he lived there would not have been one better off, or with a larger family, either in that quarter or in any of the red-washed suburbs with which Gascony has surrounded New Orleans. His women, however,—the wife and sister-in-law,—had done their share in the work: a man's share apiece, for with the Gascon women there is no discrimination of sex when it comes to work.

And they worked on just the same after he died, tending the cow, digging, hoeing, planting, watering. The day following the funeral, by daylight Jeanne Marie was shouldering around the yoke of milk-cans to his patrons, while Anne Marie carried the vegetables to market; and so on for fifty years.

They were old women now,—seventy-five years old,—and, as they expressed it, they had always been twins. In twins there is always one lucky and one unlucky one: Jeanne Marie was the lucky one, Anne Marie the unlucky one. So much so, that it was even she who had to catch the rheumatism, and to lie now bedridden, months at a time, while Jeanne Marie was as active in her sabots as she had ever been.

In spite of the age of both, and the infirmity of one, every Saturday night there was some little thing to put under the brick in the hearth, for taxes and license, and the never-to-be-forgotten funeral provision. In the husband's time gold pieces used to go in, but they had all gone to pay for the four funerals and the quadrupled doctor's bill. The women laid in silver pieces; the coins, however, grew smaller and smaller, and represented more and more not so much the gain from onions as the saving from food.

It had been explained to them how they might, all at once, make a year's gain in the lottery; and it had become their custom always, at the end of every month, to put aside one silver coin apiece, to buy a lottery ticket with—one ticket each, not for the great, but for the twenty-five-cent, prizes. Anne Marie would buy hers round about the market; Jeanne Marie would stop anywhere along her milk course and buy hers, and they would go together in the afternoon to stand with the little crowd watching the placard upon which the winning numbers were to be written. And when they were written, it was curious, Jeanne Marie's numbers would come out twice as often as Anne Marie's. Not that she ever won anything, for she was not lucky enough to have them come out in the order to win; they only came out here and there, singly: but it was sufficient to make old Anne Marie cross and ugly for a day or two, and injure the sale of the onion-basket. When she became bedridden, Jeanne Marie bought the ticket for both, on the numbers, however, that Anne Marie gave her; and Anne Marie had to lie in bed and wait, while Jeanne Marie went out to watch the placard.

One evening, watching it, Jeanne Marie saw the ticket-agent write out the numbers as they came on her ticket, in such a way that they drew a prize—forty dollars.

When the old woman saw it she felt such a happiness; just as she used to feel in the old times right after the birth of a baby. She thought of that instantly. Without saying a word to any one, she clattered over the banquette as fast as she could in her sabots, to tell the good news to Anne Marie. But she did not go so fast as not to have time to dispose of her forty dollars over and over again. Forty dollars! That was a great deal of money. She had often in her mind, when she was expecting a prize, spent twenty dollars; for she had never thought it could be more than that. But forty dollars! A new gown apiece, and black silk kerchiefs to tie over their heads instead of red cotton, and the little cabin new red-washed, and soup in the pot, and a garlic sausage, and a bottle of good, costly liniment for Anne Marie's legs; and still a pile of gold to go under the hearth-brick—a pile of gold that would have made the eyes of the defunct husband glisten.

She pushed open the picket-gate, and came into the room where her sister lay in bed.

"Eh, Anne Marie, my girl," she called in her thick, pebbly voice, apparently made purposely to suit her rough Gascon accent; "this time we have caught it!"

"Whose ticket?" asked Anne Marie, instantly.

In a flash all Anne Marie's ill luck ran through Jeanne Marie's mind; how her promised husband had proved unfaithful, and Jeanne Marie's faithful; and how, ever since, even to the coming out of her lottery numbers, even to the selling of vegetables, even to the catching of the rheumatism, she had been the loser. But above all, as she looked at Anne Marie in the bed, all the misery came over Jeanne Marie of her sister's not being able, in all her poor old seventy-five years of life, to remember the pressure of the arms of a husband about her waist, nor the mouth of a child on her breast.

As soon as Anne Marie had asked her question, Jeanne Marie answered it.

Jeanne Marie poured the money out of her cotton handkerchief into them.

Anne Marie counted it, looked at it; looked at it, counted it; and if she had not been so old, so infirm, so toothless, the smile that passed over her face would have made it beautiful.

Jeanne Marie had to leave her to draw water from the well to water the plants, and to get her vegetables ready for next morning. She felt even happier now than if she had just had a child, happier even than if her husband had just returned to her.

"Ill luck! Coton-Maï! Ill luck! There's a way to turn ill luck!" And her smile also should have beautified her face, wrinkled and ugly though it was.

She did not think any more of the spending of the money, only of the pleasure Anne Marie would take in spending it.

The water was low in the well, and there had been a long drought. There are not many old women of seventy-five who could have watered so much ground as abundantly as she did; but whenever she thought of the forty dollars and Anne Marie's smile she would give the thirsting plant an extra bucketful.

The twilight was gaining. She paused. "Coton-Maï" she exclaimed aloud. "But I must see the old woman smile again over her good luck."

Although it was "my girl" face to face, it was always "the old woman" behind each other's back.

There was a knot-hole in the plank walls of the house. In spite of Anne Marie's rheumatism they would never stop it up, needing it, they said, for light and air. Jeanne Marie slipped her feet out of her sabots and crept easily toward it, smiling, and saying "Coton-Maï!" to herself all the way. She put her eye to the hole. Anne Marie was not in the bed, she who had not left her bed for two months! Jeanne Marie looked through the dim light of the room until she found her.

Anne Marie, in her short petticoat and nightsack, with bare legs and feet, was on her knees in the corner, pulling up a plank, hiding—peasants know hiding when they see it—hiding her money away—away—away from whom?—muttering to herself and shaking her old grayhaired head. Hiding her money away from Jeanne Marie!

And this was why Jeanne Marie leaned her head against the side of the house and wept. It seemed to her that she had never known her twin sister at all.

A CRIPPLED HOPE

You must picture to yourself the quiet, dim-lighted room of a convalescent; outside, the dreary, bleak days of winter in a sparsely settled, distant country parish; inside, a slow, smoldering log-fire, a curtained bed, the infant sleeping well enough, the mother wakeful, restless, thought-driven, as a mother must be, unfortunately, nowadays, particularly in that parish, where cotton worms and overflows have acquired such a monopoly of one's future.

God is always pretty near a sick woman's couch; but nearer even than God seems the sick-nurse—at least in that part of the country, under those circumstances. It is so good to look through the dimness and uncertainty, moral and physical, and to meet those little black, steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step—the flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of balm to some woe.

She said she had, and in truth she had, no other name than "little Mammy"; and that was the name of her nature. Pure African, but bronze rather than pure black, and full-sized only in width, her growth having been hampered as to height by an injury to her hip, which had lamed her, pulling her figure awry, and burdening her with a protuberance of the joint. Her mother caused it by dropping her when a baby, and concealing it, for fear of punishment, until the dislocation became irremediable. All the animosity of which little Mammy was capable centered upon this unknown but never-to-be-forgotten mother of hers; out of this hatred had grown her love—that is, her destiny, a woman's love being her destiny. Little Mammy's love was for children.

The birth and infancy (the one as accidental as the other, one would infer) took place in—it sounds like the "Arabian Nights" now!--took place in the great room, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader's auction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buying and selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech—a great, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaning against the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, the bargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformation into the profits of the morrow.

The place can be pointed out now, is often pointed out; but no emotion arises at sight of it. It is so plain, so matter-of-fact an edifice that emotion only comes afterward in thinking about it, and then in the reflection that such an edifice could be, then as now, plain and matter-of-fact.

For the slave-trader there was no capital so valuable as the physical soundness of his stock; the moral was easily enough forged or counterfeited. Little Mammy's good-for-nothing mother was sold as readily as a vote, in the parlance of to-day; but no one would pay for a crippled baby. The mother herself would not have taken her as a gift, had it been in the nature of a negro-trader to give away anything. Some doctoring was done,—so little Mammy heard traditionally,—some effort made to get her marketable. There were attempts to pair her off as a twin sister of various correspondencies in age, size, and color, and to palm her off, as a substitute, at migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts. Nothing equaled a negro-trader's will and power for fraud, except the hereditary distrust and watchfulness which it bred and maintained. And so, in the even balance between the two categories, the little cripple remained a fixture in the stream of life that passed through that back room, in the fluxes and refluxes of buying and selling; not valueless, however—rely upon a negro-trader for discovering values as substitutes, as panaceas. She earned her nourishment, and Providence did not let it kill the little animal before the emancipation of weaning arrived.