War it was. The horsemen grew scarce on the wide prairies of Opelousas. Far away in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, on bloody fields, many an Acadian volunteer and many a poor conscript fought and fell for a cause that was really none of theirs, simple, non-slaveholding peasants; and many died in camp and hospital--often of wounds, often of fevers, often of mere longing for home. Bonaventure and Zosephine learned this much of war: that it was a state of affairs in which dear faces went away, and strange ones came back with tidings that brought bitter wailings from mothers and wives, and made _les vieux_--the old fathers--sit very silent. Three times over that was the way of it in Sosthene's house. It was also a condition of things that somehow changed boys into men very young. A great distance away, but still in sight south-westward across the prairie, a dot of dark green showed where dwelt a sister and brother-in-law of Sosthene's _vieille_,--wife. There was not the same domestic excellence there as at Sosthene's; yet the dooryard was very populous with fowls; within the house was always heard the hard thump, thump, of the loom, or the loud moan of the spinning-wheel; and the children were many. The eldest was Athanase. Though but fifteen he was already stalwart, and showed that intelligent sympathy in the family cares that makes such offspring the mother's comfort and the father's hope. At that age he had done but one thing to diminish that comfort or that hope. One would have supposed an ambitious chap like him would have spent his first earnings, as other ambitious ones did, for a saddle; but 'Thanase Beausoleil had bought a fiddle. He had hardly got it before he knew how to play it. Yet, to the father's most welcome surprise, he remained just as bold a rider and as skilful a thrower of the _arriatte_ as ever. He came into great demand for the Saturday-night balls. When the courier with a red kerchief on a wand came galloping round, the day before, from _ile_ to _ile_,--for these descendants of a maritime race call their homestead groves islands,--to tell where the ball was to be, he would assert, if there was even a hope of it, that 'Thanase was to be the fiddler.