"H'm, Agapit LeNoir," reflected Vesper, darting a critical glance at him. "The Acadien who was to unbosom himself to me. He does not look as if he would enjoy the process," and he took his seat at the table, where Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, grown strangely quiet, served his breakfast in an almost unbroken silence.
Vesper thoughtfully poured some of the thick yellow cream on his porridge, and enjoyably dallied over it, but when his landlady would have set before him a dish of smoking hot potatoes and beefsteak, he said, "I do not care for anything further."
Rose à Charlitte drew back in undisguised concern. "But you have eaten nothing. Agapit has taken twice as much as this."
"That is the young man I met just now?"
"Yes, he is my cousin; very kind to me. His parents are dead, and he was brought up by my stepmother. He is so clever, so clever! It is truly strange what he knows. His uncle, who was a priest, left him many papers, and all day, when Agapit does not work, he sits and writes or reads. Some day he will be a learned man—"
Rose paused abruptly. In her regret at the stranger's want of appetite she was forgetting that she had resolved to have no further conversation with him, and in sudden confusion she made the excuse that she wished to see her child, and melted away like a snowflake, in the direction of the kitchen, where Vesper had just heard Narcisse's sweet voice asking permission to talk to the Englishman from Boston.
The young American wandered out to the stable. Two Acadiens were there, asking Agapit for the loan of a set of harness. At Vesper's approach they continued their conversation in French, although he had distinctly heard them speaking excellent English before he joined them.
These men were employing an almost new language to him. This was not the French of L'Évangéline, of Doctor Arseneau, nor of Rose à Charlitte. Nor was it patois such as he had heard in France, and which would have been unintelligible to him. This must be the true Acadien dialect, and he listened with pleasure to the softening and sweetening of some syllables and the sharpening and ruining of others. They were saying ung houmme, for a man. This was not unmusical; neither was persounne, for nobody; but the ang sound so freely interspersing their sentences was detestable; as was also the reckless introduction of English phrases, such as "all right," "you bet," "how queer," "too proud," "funny," "steam-cars," and many others.
Their conversation for some time left the stable, then it returned along the line of discussion of a glossy black horse that stood in one of the stalls.
"Ce cheval est de bounne harage" (this horse is well-bred), said one of the Acadiens, admiringly, and Vesper's thoughts ran back to a word in the Latin grammar of his boyhood. Hara, a pen or stable. De bonne race, a modern Frenchman would be likely to say. Probably these men were speaking the language brought by their ancestors to Acadie; without doubt they were. On this Bay would be presented to him the curious spectacle of the descendants of a number of people lifted bodily out of France, and preserving in their adopted country the tongue that had been lost to the motherland. In France the language had drifted. Here the Acadiens were using the same syllables that had hung on the lips of kings, courtiers, poets, and wits of three and four hundred years ago.