Claude widened to his new experience with the rapidity of something hatched out of a shell. Moreover, accident was in his favor; the party was short-handed in its upper ranks, and Claude found himself by this stress taken into larger and larger tasks as fast as he could, though ever so crudely, qualify for them. "'Tisn't at all the best thing for you," said one of the surveyors, "but I'll lend you some books that will teach you the why as well as the how." In the use of these books by lantern-light certain skill with the pen showed itself; and when at length one day a despatch reached camp from the absent "chief" stating that in two or three days certain matters would take him to Vermilionville, and ordering that some one be sent at once with all necessary field notes and appliances, and give his undivided time to the making of certain urgently needed maps, and the only real draughtsman of the party was ill with swamp-fever, Claude was sent. On his last half-day's journey toward the place, he had fallen in with an old gentleman whom others called "Governor," a tall, trim figure, bent but little under fourscore years, with cheerful voice and ready speech, and eyes hidden behind dark glasses and flickering in their deep sockets. "Go to Madame Beausoleil's," he advised Claude. "That is the place for you. Excellent person; I've known her from childhood; a woman worthy a higher station." And so, all by accident, chance upon chance, here was Claude making maps; and this delightful work, he thought, was really all he was doing, in Zosephine's little inner parlor. By and by it was done. The engineer had not yet arrived. The storm had delayed work in one place and undone work in another, and he was detained beyond expectation. But a letter said he would come in a day or two more, and some maps of earlier surveys, drawn by skilled workmen in great New Orleans, arrived; seeing which, Claude blushed for his own and fell to work to make them over. "If at first you not succeed," said Claude,-- "Try--try aga-a-ain," responded Marguerite; "Bonaventure learn me that poetry; and you?" "Yass," said Claude. He stood looking down at his work and not seeing it. What he saw was Grande Pointe in the sunset hour of a spring day six years gone, the wet, spongy margin of a tiny bayou under his feet, the great swamp at his back, the leafy undergrowth all around; his canoe and paddle waiting for him, and Bonaventure repeating to him--swamp urchin of fourteen--the costliest words of kindness--to both of them the costliest--that he had ever heard, ending with these two that Marguerite had spoken. As he resumed his work, he said, without lifting his eyes: "Seem' to me 'f I could make myself like any man in dat whole worl', I radder make myself like Bonaventure. And you?"