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“Yass,” put in his partner, smiling to her needle, “the good God know’ that verrie well.” And the pair exchanged a look of dove-like fondness.

“Yass,” Manouvrier mused aloud once more, “I think I build my ole woman one fine house.”

“Ah! I don’t want!”

“But yass! Foudre tonnerre! how I goin’ spend her else? w’iskee? hosses? women? what da dev’l! Naw, I build a fine ‘ouse. You see! she want dat house bad enough when she see her. Yass; fifty t’ousan’ dollah faw house and twenty-five t’ousan'”–he whisked his thumb at me and I said for him,

“Yes, twenty-five thousand at interest to keep up the establishment.”

“Yass. Den if Pastropbon go first to dat boneyard–” And out went his thumb again, while his hairy lip curled at the grim prospect of beating Fate the second time, and as badly, in the cemetery, as the first time, in the lottery.

He built the house–farther down town and much farther from the river. Both husband and wife found a daily delight in watching its slow rise and progress. In the room behind the shop he still plied his art and she her needle as they had done all their married life, with never an inroad upon their accustomed hours except the calls of the shop itself; but on every golden morning of that luxurious summer-land, for a little while before the carpenters and plasterers arrived and dragged off their coats, the pair spent a few moments wandering through and about the building together, she with her hen-like crooning, he with his unsmiling face.

Yet they never showed the faintest desire to see the end. The contractor dawdled by the month. I never saw such dillydallying. They only abetted it, and when once he brought an absurd and unasked-for excuse to the taxidermist’s shop, its proprietor said–first shutting the door between them and the wife in the inner room:

“Tek yo’ time. Mo’ sloweh she grow, mo’ longeh she stan’.”

I doubt that either Manouvrier or his wife hinted to the other the true reason for their apathy. But I guessed it, only too easily, and felt its pang. It was that with the occupancy and care of the house must begin the wife’s absence from her old seat beside her husband at his work.

Another thing troubled me. I did persuade him to put fittings into his cistern which fire-engines could use in case of emergency, but he would not insure the building.

“Naw! Luck bring me dat–I let luck take care of her.”

“Ah! yass,” chimed the wife, “yet still I think mebbee the good God tell luck where to bring her. I’m shoe he got fing-er in that pie.”

“Ah-ha? Daz all right! If God want to burn his own fing-er—-“

At length the house was finished and was beautiful within and without. It was of two and a half stories, broad and with many rooms. Two spacious halls crossed each other, and there were wide verandas front and back, and a finished and latticed basement. The basement and the entire grounds, except a few bright flower-borders, were flagged, as was also the sidewalk, with the manufactured stone which in that nearly frostless climate makes such a perfect and beautiful pavement, and on this fair surface fell the large shadows of laburnum, myrtle, orange, oleander, sweet-olive, mespelus, and banana, which the taxidermist had not spared expense to transplant here in the leafy prime of their full growth.

Then almost as slowly the dwelling was furnished. In this the brother-in- law’s widow co-operated, and when it was completed Manouvrier suggested her living in it a few days so that his wife might herself move in as leisurely as she chose. And six months later, there, in the old back room in St. Peter Street, the wife still sat sewing and now and then saying small, wise, dispassionate things to temper the warmth of her partner’s more artistic emotions. Every fair day, about the hour of sunset, they went to see the new house. It was plain they loved it; loved it only less than their old life; but only the brother-in-law’s widow lived in it.