The lad guessed what was going on; those happy Kaskaskians, the fine world, were having a ball at Colonel Menard's. Summer and winter they danced, they made fetes, they enjoyed life. When the territorial Assembly met in this capital of the West, he had often frosted himself late into the winter night, watching the lights and listening to the music in Kaskaskia. Jean Lozier knew every bit of its history. The parish priest, Father Olivier, who came to hear him confess because he could not leave his grandfather, had told it to him. There was a record book transmitted from priest to priest from the earliest settlement of Cascasquia of the Illinois. Jean loved the story of young D'Artaguette, whom the boatmen yet celebrated in song. On moonlight nights, when the Mississippi showed its broad sheet four miles away across the level plain, he sometimes fooled himself with thinking he could see the fleet of young soldiers passing down the river, bearing the French flag; phantoms proceeding again to their tragedy and the Indian stake. He admired the seat where his seignior lived in comfort and great hospitality, but all the crowds pressing to Pierre Menard's house seemed to him to have less wisdom than the single man who met and passed them and crossed the bridge into Kaskaskia. The vesper bell rung, breaking its music in echoes against the sandstone bosom of the bluff. Red splendors faded from the sky, leaving a pearl-gray bank heaped over the farther river. Still Jean watched Kaskaskia. "But the glory remains when the light fades away," he sung to himself. He had caught the line from some English boatmen. "Ye dog, ye dog, where are you, ye dog?" called a voice from the woods behind him. "Here, grandfather," answered Jean, starting like a whipped dog. He took his red cap from under his arm, sighing, and slouched away from the bluff edge, the coarse homespun which he wore revealing knots and joints in his work-hardened frame. "Ye dog, am I to have my supper to-night?" "Yes, grandfather." But Jean took one more look at the capital of his love, which he had never entered, and for which he was unceasingly homesick. The governor's carriage dashed along the road beneath him, with a military escort from Fort Chartres. He felt no envy of such state. He would have used the carriage to cross the bridge. "If I but lived in Kaskaskia!" whispered Jean. The man on horseback, who met and passed the ball-goers, rode through Kaskaskia's twinkling streets in the pleasant glow of twilight. Trade had not reached its day's end. The crack of long whips could be heard, flourished over oxen yoked by the horns, or three or four ponies hitched tandem, all driven without reins, and drawing huge bales of merchandise. Few of the houses were more than one story high, but they had a sumptuous spread, each in its own square of lawn, orchard, and garden. They were built of stone, or of timbers filled in with stone and mortar.