For a time the family peace was perfect, and Honore, by a touch here to-day and a word there to-morrow, was ever lifting the name, and all who bore it, a little and a little higher; when suddenly, as in his father's day--that dear Numa who knew how to sacrifice his very soul, as a sort of Iphigenia for the propitiation of the family gods--as in Numa's day came the cession to Spain, so now fell this other cession, like an unexpected tornado, threatening the wreck of her children's slave-schooners and the prostration alike of their slave-made crops and their Spanish liberties; and just in the fateful moment where Numa would have stood by her, Honore had let go.

Ah, it was bitter! "See what foreign education does!" cried a Mandarin de Grandissime of the Baton Rouge Coast.

"I am sorry now"-- derisively--"that I never sent _my_ boy to France, am I not?
No! No-o-o! I would rather my son should never know how to read, than that he should come back from Paris repudiating the sentiments and prejudices of his own father.

Is education better than family peace?
Ah, bah! My son make friends with Americains and tell me they--that call a negro 'monsieur'-- are as good as his father?
But that is what we get for letting Honore become a merchant.

Ha! the degradation! Shaking hands with men who do not believe in the slave trade! Shake hands?
Yes; associate--fraternize! with apothecaries and negrophiles.