The spirit of a venerable garden as it rises and shows itself to memory is such a benediction that one seeing the vision may sometimes wonder if, if _life_, _per se_, be eternal, and the resurrection of _certain_ so-called "dead" a _fact_, we may not some day wander again in the risen gardens of our childhood, recognizing them by verification of certain familiar faces of flowers who may know us in turn and bloom again--taking up life, which ever includes love and immortality, at the point of suspension, as a mother, waking from a nap, goes back to her window, and catching up her broken song held in the cobwebs of sleep, sings it through, while she finishes a little sleeve, her foot again upon the cradle at her side. Life is the great serial--one chapter printed here, another there--a seemingly finished comedy crowding a tragedy unrelated, yonder. The discerning artist who, reading as he runs, brings these parts into line will have begun the great book. Until Gabriel wills, it may not be finished. IV It was, no doubt, but natural that the man of the world, who had deserted such an Eden of his own designing for the ostensible excuse of business convenience, should have resented in his sons their inherited repugnance to the retired life. What more formidable combatant than one's own stubbornness, turned to confront him, in his children? * * * * * The broken trip from New Orleans to the Island took nearly two days, although the crow does it easily in a few hours. The initial munificence of chartering one of the great Mississippi steamboats for the first stage of the journey set the pace for the entire occasion. Host and hostess met their guests at the river landing with carriages and cane wagons gaily bedecked with evergreens, mosses, and dogwood branches in flower, and a merry drive through several miles of forest brought them to the banks of the bayou, where a line of rowboats awaited them. The negro boatmen, two to man each skiff, wearing jumpers of the Harvard crimson, stood uncovered in line at the bayou's edge, and as the party alighted, they served black coffee from a fire in the open. The negro with a cup of coffee his own hue and clear as wine is ever an ubiquitous combination in the Louisiana lowlands. He bobs up so unexpectedly in strange places balancing his tiny tray upon his hand, that a guest soon begins to look for him almost anywhere after an interval of about three dry hours, and with a fair chance of not being disappointed. * * * * *