About five weeks earlier than this, a passenger on an eastward-bound train of Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railway stood at the rear door of the last coach, eying critically the track as it glided swiftly from under the train and shrank perpetually into the west. The coach was nearly empty. No one was near him save the brakeman, and by and by he took his attention from the track and let it rest on this person. There he found a singular attraction. Had he seen that face before, or why did it provoke vague reminiscences of great cypresses overhead, and deep-shaded leafy distances with bayous winding out of sight through them, and cane-brakes impenetrable to the eye, and axe-strokes--heard but unseen--slashing through them only a few feet away? Suddenly he knew. "Wasn't it your father," he said, "who was my guide up Bayou des Acadiens and Blind River the time I made the survey in that big swamp north of Grande Pointe? Isn't your name Claude St. Pierre?" And presently they were acquainted. "You know I took a great fancy to your father. And you've been clear through the arithmetic twice? Why, see here; you're just the sort of man I--Look here; don't you want to learn to be a surveyor?" The questioner saw that same ambition which had pleased him so in the father, leap for joy in the son's eyes. An agreement was quickly reached. Then the surveyor wandered into another coach, and nothing more passed between them that day save one matter, which, though trivial, has its place. When the surveyor returned to the rear train, Claude was in a corner seat gazing pensively through the window and out across the wide, backward-flying, purpling green cane-fields of St. Mary, to where on the far left the live-oaks of Bayou Teche seemed hoveringly to follow on the flank of their whooping and swaggering railway-train. Claude turned and met the stranger's regard with a faint smile. His new friend spoke first. "Matters may turn out so that we can have your father"-- Claude's eyes answered with a glad flash. "Dass what I was t'inkin'!" he said, with a soft glow that staid even when he fell again into revery. But when the engineer--for it seems that he was an engineer, chief of a party engaged in redeeming some extensive waste swamp and marsh lands--when the chief engineer, on the third day afterward, drew near the place where he suddenly recollected Claude would be waiting to enter his service, and recalled this part of their previous interview, he said to himself, "No, it would be good for the father, but not best for the son," and fell to thinking how often parents are called upon to wrench their affections down into cruel bounds to make the foundations of their children's prosperity.