Across the hall would be young people dancing. But there was no more Guinolee, no more anxious, eager crowds to see who would get the beans in the cake, no strife to be queens, no anxiety to be chosen kings; that, with other old things, had passed away.
“I wonder,” Renée says, smiling absently, “if they have as good times as they used to in old St. Louis? There are so many pleasures now.”
No one goes round on New Year’s Eve singing songs, saying, “Good-night, master; good-night, mistress. I wish you great joy and good luck.”
And this was to be all swept away by the imperious demand of the growing city; but it was true then that Renée and André Valbonais and Gaspard Denys had gone to that country which is never to know any change, for God is in the midst of it.
Before the century was half gone the dream of the old explorers had come true, and many a new explorer gave up his life, as well as De Soto and La Salle. For out on the western coasts, over mountain fastnesses, through gorges and beyond the Mississippi thousands of miles lay the land of gold; lay, too, a new road to India. Out and out on the high ground has stretched the great city. The old mill and the queer winding pond went long ago. The Chouteau house, where there were many gatherings both grave and gay of the older people, is the Merchants’ Exchange. Here and there a place is marked by some memento. But when you see the little old map with its Rue this and that, one smiles and contrasts its small levee with the twenty or more miles of water front, kept, too, within bounds, bridged over magnificently. And if its traders are not as picturesque as Indians and voyageurs and trappers in their different attire, they still seem from almost every nation.
Most of the French have gone. There is no exclusive French circle, as in New Orleans. Here and there a family is proud to trace back its ancestry and keep alive the old tongue. But the old houses have disappeared as well. Sometimes one finds one of the second decade, with its gable windows jutting out of the peaked roof, and one waits to see a brown, dried-up, wrinkled face in French coif and gay shoulder shawl peering out, but it is only a dream.
And surely the Germans earned their birthright with the loyalty of those days when the whole country was rent with the throes of civil war. There was a delightful, friendly, well-bred class of planters from the middle Southern States, who had lovely homes in and about the town, and who clung to their traditions, the system of slavery being more to them than a united country. But the patriotism of these adopted citizens, who had learned many wise lessons at a high price, was a wall against which the forces threw themselves to defeat, and again the everlasting truth conquered.
The youth of cities is the childhood of maturer purposes, knowledge, experience. Each brings with it the traditions of race, of surroundings, to outgrow them later on. Does one really sigh for the past, looking at the present? At the towns and cities and the wealth-producing inventions, where the silence of the wilderness reigned a hundred years ago, or broken only by the wild animals that ranged in their depths, and here and there an Indian lodge? And the new race, born of many others, proud, generous, courageous, men of breadth and foresight, who have bridged streams and hewn down mountains, made the solitary gorges familiar pictures to thousands, and have had their wise and earnest opinions moulded into public wisdom and usefulness, mothers who have added sweetness and wholesome nurture and refined daily living, children growing up to transform the beautiful city again, perhaps, though as one walks its splendid streets one wonders if there is any better thing to come, if the genius of man can devise more worthiness.
The new white city may answer it to the countless thousands who will come from all the quarters of the globe.
But the Little Girl and Old St. Louis had their happy day and are garnered among the memories of the past.