The next step of the French gentleman was to build beside the Southern river a family mansion, whose door he promptly closed upon the Swiss adventurer, since virtue consists not so much in refusing to benefit by vice as in refusing to acknowledge the benefit. Not without a sense of nervous perturbation, he then proceeded to cast his gaze upon the most promising feminine pledges of progeny. From among a dozen or so of his fair neighbors he selected, with the experienced eye of a woman-fancier, the blooming specimen of Swiss buxomness, and, the adventurer coming to terms, the marriage had been celebrated without the retarding curtain-raiser of a romantic prelude. The gentleman's name was Marcel Musin de Biencourt; the lady's has no place in the following history. For a period matters progressed in natural sequence. The land was tilled, the cotton picked, and the lady installed in the best bedroom of the newly erected mansion. Had she played the part for which nature and her lord intended her, there is reason to suppose that she would have become a serviceable instrument in the preservation of the species. But the gentleman had reckoned without Providence. With the ending of the year of her bridehood the roses in the lady's cheeks grew waxen, and she turned with a sigh of relief from the labor of travail to the rest of the little church-yard upon the hill. The aspens shivered above her, the river purled between level fields far down below, and from the uprooted furrows around the dutiful corn put forth tender sprouts; but the lady had shirked her mission in its first fulfilment, and with the birth-time of the year she neither rose nor stirred. In the best bedroom the dust thickened upon the chintz curtains, and a weak and sickly hostage to fortune yelled his new throat hoarse with premonition of the inhospitality of the planet upon which he had been precipitated. Disappointed in his estimate of woman's nature, the gentleman of France decided to economize in material, and to rear a race from the unpromising specimen in his possession. Faithfully he strove to fulfil his part, and when the boy reached manhood, he laid himself down beside his wife upon the hill. From this time on the family record is biblically concise. Marcel begot Marcel, and again Marcel begot Marcel, and yet again. While the root Musin languished, De Biencourt, the lofty family tree, withered and died, to be forgotten. Neither in history nor in tradition, nor in the paths of private virtue, was a Musin known to have distinguished himself. If he took up arms in the American Revolution, he took them up in a manner unworthy of record; if he favored the Declaration of Independence, he did not commit his preference to paper; if he excelled in any way, it was in the way of mediocrity--which is perhaps the safest way of all.