“Because he was a Greek and Latin scholar, and was so enamored of the hexameter verse that he tried to reproduce it in English. He didn’t accomplish the purpose, but he wrote some mighty good things in trying to do it.” “But tell us, Ed,” said Constant, “why did Evangeline’s people come all the way down here?” “They were French, and they naturally sought for a country where the French constituted the greater part of the population. This wasn’t English territory then. By the way, that reminds me of a good Vevay story. When I was a very little boy, I used to go occasionally to pay my respects to the oldest lady in town--‘Grandmother Grisard,’ as we all reverently called her. She was a lovely old lady, and she once told me how she came to Vevay. She set out from Switzerland very early in this century, being then a young girl, to come to this French-settled Red River country, where her people had friends. But there are two Red Rivers in America, this one and the Red River of the North, which runs from Minnesota northward into Manitoba. Europeans were rather weak on American geography in those days, so instead of bringing this young girl to the Red River of Louisiana, the transportation people took her to the Red River of the North. That region was then entirely wild. Indians and Canadian half-breeds were practically its only inhabitants, and so the young Swiss girl was in the greatest peril. “She learned, after a while, that some Swiss people had settled at Vevay, in what was then the wild, uninhabited Northwest Territory. So she set out to find Vevay, and to find people that could talk her own mother tongue. It was an awful journey across the wild, savage-haunted prairie region that now constitutes Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, but she made it. It required months of time. It involved terrible hardships and fearful dangers from the Indians. But after the long struggle the young Swiss girl reached Vevay and was again among people of her own race, who spoke her own language. She soon after married the most prosperous man in the village, Mr. Grisard, and, as you all know, her sons and her grandsons have ever since been men of mark in the town.”[3] [3] This story is true in every particular.--_Author._ “Good for you, Ed!” said Will Moreraud. “We fellows of Swiss descent thank you. We are all more or less akin to Grandmother Grisard, after two or three generations of intermarriages, and now that we know her story we shall cherish it as a family legend of our own. In fact, I suspect that our Swiss forefathers and foremothers made a pretty good place out of Vevay before the Virginians and Yankees and Scotch-Irish from whom you fellows sprang ever thought of settling there.”