But Chicot paid no heed. What was to him the funeral of a woman who had died in St. Philip street? He did not even turn his head in the direction of the moving procession. He went on scaling his red-snapper.


The Lilies


The Lilies

That little vagabond Mamouche amused himself one afternoon by letting down the fence rails that protected Mr. Billy’s young crop of cotton and corn. He had first looked carefully about him to make sure there was no witness to this piece of rascality. Then he crossed the lane and did the same with the Widow Angèle’s fence, thereby liberating Toto, the white calf who stood disconsolately penned up on the other side.

It was not ten seconds before Toto was frolicking madly in Mr. Billy’s crop, and Mamouche—the young scamp—was running swiftly down the lane, laughing fiendishly to himself as he went.

He could not at first decide whether there could be more fun in letting Toto demolish things at his pleasure, or in warning Mr. Billy of the calf’s presence in the field. But the latter course commended itself as possessing a certain refinement of perfidy.

“Ho, the’a, you!” called out Mamouche to one of Mr. Billy’s hands, when he got around to where the men were at work; “you betta go yon’a an’ see ’bout that calf o’ Ma’me Angèle; he done broke in the fiel’ an’ ’bout to finish the crop, him.” Then Mamouche went and sat behind a big tree, where, unobserved, he could laugh to his heart’s content.