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I see the grand mansion of the planter, with its orange-groves and gardens, its green Venetians, cool verandahs, and pretty palings. I see the huge sugar-house, or tobacco-shed, or cotton "pickery;" and there, too, are the neat "cabins," clustering together or running in a row, like the bathing-boxes at a fashionable watering-place.
That evening about nine the Quaker slipped into my room. "How about that tobacco-shed?" he asked. "Is it well guarded?" "Faulkner and one of the men sleep above it, and there are a couple of fierce dogs chained at the door. Unless they know the stranger, he will be apt to lose the seat of his breeches." The Quaker nodded, well pleased.
His spectacled eyes peered everywhere, and his shrewd sense judged instantly of a thing's value. He approved of the tobacco-shed as a store for arms, for he could reach it from the river by a little-used road through the woods. It was easy so to arrange, the contents that a passing visitor could guess nothing, and no one ever penetrated to its recesses but Faulkner and myself.
Then the best of every wardrobe was put on, the sun soared high, and by noon every chair in Grande Pointe was in the tobacco-shed where knowledge poured forth her beams, and was occupied by one or two persons. And then, at last, the chapel bell above Claude's head pealed out the final signal, and the schoolmaster moved across the green. Bonaventure Deschamps was weary. Had aught gone wrong?
The young master was there, and all the children; so that really there was nothing to ring the bell for. They could, all together, have walked quietly across the village green to the forlorn tobacco-shed that 'Mian had given them for a schoolhouse, and begun the session. Ah! say not so! It was good to ring the bell.
That tobacco-shed of mine would have made a brave explosion if some one had kindled it, and, indeed, the thing more than once was near happening through a negro's foolishness. I spent all my evenings, when at home, in making a map of the country.
The children had come home from the atmosphere of that old tobacco-shed, and persuaded the very grandmothers to understand vaguely very vaguely and dimly that the day of liberty which had come to the world at large a hundred years before had come at last to them; that in France their race had been peasants; in Acadia, forsaken colonists; in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, exiles alien to the land, the language, and the times; in St.
"Ah! my child, a hundred miles; even more." "And to my uncle Rosamond's, Rosamond Robichaux, on Bayou Terrebonne?" "Fully as far, and almost the same journey." There was but one thing to be done, crush Claude out of her heart. The storm had left no wounds on Grande Pointe. Every roof was safe, even the old tobacco-shed where Bonaventure had kept school before the schoolhouse was built.
He warned me, I remember, to be on my guard against some of the young bloods, who might visit me to make mischief. "It's not that they know anything of our affairs," he said, "but that they have got a prejudice against yourself, Mr. Garvald. They are foolish, hot-headed lads, very puffed up by their pride of gentrice, and I do not like the notion of their playing pranks in that tobacco-shed."
"Now, then, have you folks got any other charge against him? Has he stolen anything? Like a mule, for instance? Has he robbed a hen-roost? Has he assaulted anybody, or set a tobacco-shed on fire? Some one must make a charge; I don't much care what it is." The old man scowled round on the people nearest him and down on the crowd below.
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