The older replied in an affirmative that could but just be heard, laid back a long lock of his straight brown hair after the manner of a short-haired girl, and rose to his feet. "I hunt," said the traveller slowly, "Mr. Maximian Roussel." A silent bow. "'Tis you?" The same motion again. The traveller produced a slip of paper folded once and containing a line or two of writing hastily pencilled that morning at Belle Alliance. Maximian received it timidly and held it helplessly before his downcast eyes with the lines turned perpendicularly, while the pause grew stifling, and until the traveller said:-- "'Tis Mr. Wallis make that introduction." At the name of the owner of the beautiful plantation the man who had not yet spoken rose, covered with whittlings. It was like a steer getting up out of the straw. He spoke. "M'sieu' Walleece, _a commence a mouliner_? Is big-in to gryne?" "He shall commence in the centre of the next week." Maximian's eyes rose slowly from the undeciphered paper. The traveller's met them. He pointed to the missive. "The schoolmaster therein alluded--'tis me." "Oh!" cried the villager joyously, "_maitre d'ecole!_--schooltitcher!" "But," said the stranger, "not worthy the title." He accepted gratefully the hand of one and then of the other. "Walk een!" said Maximian, "all hand', walk een house." They went, Indian file, across the road, down a sinuous footpath, over a stile, and up to his little single-story unpainted house, and tramped in upon the railed galerie. "_Et_ M'sieu' Le Bourgeois," said the host, as the schoolmaster accepted a split-bottomed chair, "he's big-in to gryne?" Within this ground-floor veranda--chief appointment of all Acadian homes--the traveller accepted a drink of water in a blue tumbler, brought by the meek wife. The galerie just now was scattered with the husband's appliances for making Perique tobacco into "carats"--the carat-press. Its small, iron-ratcheted, wooden windlass extended along the top rail of the balustrade across one of the galerie's ends. Lines of half-inch grass rope, for wrapping the carats into diminished bulk and solid shape, lay along under foot. Beside one of the doors, in deep hickory baskets, were the parcels of cured tobacco swaddled in cotton cloths and ready for the torture of ropes and windlass. From the joists overhead hung the pods of tobacco-seed for next year's planting. CHAPTER III. THE HANDSHAKING.