When I say the parent of one of these two children and guardian of the other was a man of note, I mean, for one thing, his house was painted. That he was the owner of thousands of cattle, one need not mention, for so were others who were quite inconspicuous, living in unpainted houses, rarely seeing milk, never tasting butter; men who at call of their baptismal names would come forth from these houses barefooted and bareheaded in any weather, and, while their numerous progeny grouped themselves in the doorway one behind another in inverse order of age and stature, would either point out your lost way, or, quite as readily as Sosthene, ask you in beneath a roof where the coffee-pot never went dry or grew cold by day. Nor would it distinguish him from them to say he had many horses or was always well mounted. It was a land of horsemen. One met them incessantly; men in broad hats and dull homespun, with thin, soft, untrimmed brown beards, astride of small but handsome animals, in Mexican saddles, the girths and bridles of plaited hair, sometimes a _pialle_ or _arriatte_--lasso, lariat--of plaited rawhide coiled at the saddle-bow. "Adieu, Onesime"--always adieu at meeting, the same as at parting. "Adieu, Francois; adieu, Christophe; adieu, Lazare;" and they with their gentle, brown-eyed, wild-animal gaze, "Adjieu." What did make Sosthene notable was the quiet thing we call thrift, made graceful by certain rudiments of taste. To say Sosthene, means Madame Sosthene as well; and this is how it was that Zosephine Gradnego and Bonaventure Deschamps, though they went not to school, nevertheless had "advantages." For instance, the clean, hard-scrubbed cypress floors beneath their pattering feet; the neat round parti-colored mats at the doors that served them for towns and villages; the strips of home-woven carpet that stood for roads--this one to Mermentau, that one to Cote Gelee, a third _a la chapelle_; the walls of unpainted pine; the beaded joists under the ceiling; the home-made furniture, bedsteads and wardrobes of stained woods, and hickory chairs with rawhide seats, hair uppermost; the white fringed counterpanes on the high featherbeds; especially, in the principal room, the house's one mantelpiece, of wood showily stained in three colors and surmounted by a pair of gorgeous vases, beneath which the two children used to stand and feast their eyes, worth fifty cents if they were worth one,--these were as books to them indoors; and out in the tiny garden, where they played wild horse and wild cow, and lay in ambush for butterflies, they came under the spell of marigolds, prince's-feathers, lady-slippers, immortelles, portulaca, jonquil, lavender, althaea, love-apples, sage, violets, amaryllis, and that grass ribbon they call _jarretiere de la vierge_,--the virgin's garter.