They told the story of the chapel: how some years before, in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at the parish seat a few miles away on the Mississippi, a nun had by the Pope's leave cast off the veil; how she had come to Grande Pointe and taken charge of her widowed brother's children; and how he had died, and she had found means, the children knew not how, to build this chapel. And now she was buried under it, they said. It seemed, from what they left unsaid as well as what they said, that the simple influence of her presence had kindled a desire for education in Grande Pointe not known before.
"Dass my _tante_--my hant. She _was_ my hant befo' she die'," said the little man of eight years, hopping along the turf in front of the rest. He dropped into a walk that looked rapid, facing round and moving backward. "She learn me English, my _tante_. And she try to learn Sidonie; but Sidonie, Sidonie fine that too strong to learn, that English, Sidonie." He hopped again, talking as he hopped, and holding the lifted foot in his hand. He could do that and speak English at the same time, so talented was Toutou.
Thus the sun went down. And at Maximian's stile again Bonaventure Deschamps took the children's cheeks into his slender fingers and kissed them, one by one, beginning at the least, and so up, slowly, toward Sidonie Le Blanc. With very earnest tenderness it was done, some grave word of inspiration going before each caress; but when at last he said, "To-morrow, dear chil'run, the school-bell shall ring in Gran' Point'!" and turned to finish with Sidonie--she was gone.
Where the fields go wild and grow into brakes, and the soil becomes fenny, on the north-western edge of Grande Pointe, a dark, slender thread of a bayou moves loiteringly north-eastward into a swamp of huge cypresses. In there it presently meets another like itself, the Bayou Tchackchou, slipping around from the little farm village's eastern end as silently as a little mother comes out of a bower where she has just put her babe to sleep. A little farther on they are joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed, blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens. From Lake Maurepas one can go up Amite or Tickfaw River, or to Pass Manchac or Pontchatoula, anywhere in the world, in fact,--where a canoe can go.