delicious prattle of 'Cadian French! what gurgling and suppressed laughter! One of my companions – there were three of us, two Natchitoches men and myself – one of them related an extraordinary experience which the infant had endured a month or two before. He had fallen into an old unused cistern a great distance from the house. In falling through the arms by some protecting limbs, and thus insecurely sustained he had called and wailed for two hours before help came.

“Yas,” said his mother who had come back into the room, “’is face was black like de stove w’en we fine ‘im. An’ de cistern was all fill’ up wid lizard’ an’ snake’. It was one big snake all curl’ up on de udder en’ de branch, lookin’ at ‘im de whole time.” His little swarthy, rosy moon-face beamed cheerfully at us from over his mother’s shoulder, and his black eyes glittered like a squirrel’s. I wondered how he had lived through those two hours of suffering and terror. But the little children’s world is so unreal, that no doubt it is often difficult for them to distinguish between the life of the imagination and of reality.

The earth was covered with two inches of snow, as white, as dazzling, as soft as northern snow and a hundred times more beautiful. Snow upon and beneath the moss-draped branches of the forests; snow along the bayou’s edges, powdering the low, pointed, thick palmetto growths; white snow and the fields and fields of white cotton bursting from dry bolls. The Natchitoches train sped leisurely through the white, still country, and I longed for some companion to sit beside me who would feel the marvelous and strange beauty of the scene as I did. My neighbor was a gentlemen of too practical a turn.

“Oh! the cotton and the snow!” I almost screamed as the first vision of a white cotton field appeared.

“Yes, the lazy rascals; won’t pick a lock of it; cotton at 4 cts, what’s the use they say.”

“What’s the use,” I agreed. How cold and inky black the negroes looked, standing in the white patches.