"Sunday!" Mrs. Todd gasped, with upraised hands and eyes.
"Sunday!" echoed Yuki, less vociferously, but with a corresponding air of pained astonishment.
"Certainement!" ejaculated Pierre, who was beginning to feel at home. "It is transplanted Paris. Why not Sunday night, better than another? All persons have been to mass, except our naughty selves. The piety of the others may chance to include us. God is good! Allons! The opera is Faust, with the full ballet and music. Time means little here! Vive New Orleans!" After a laughing glance into Mrs. Todd's still dubious countenance he whispered, insinuatingly, "It is never to be known in Washington or—Tokio—dear Madame."
In the end he carried his point and his party. Never had he been in such spirits. Yuki could scarcely keep her eyes from his radiant face. Mr. Todd declared him a mineral spring that had just blown its way through a boulder. He stopped turbaned mammies or wondering children on the banquets,—which in New Orleans means sidewalks,—that he might elicit, by his correct Parisian French, answers in the delicious native patois. At each success he hugged himself anew.
"Ç'est ça, même! Mo pas geignin l'argent pour butin çi lalà!" he murmured ecstatically. "Geignin plein!" Passing the cathedral, Pierre asked of a lounging, large-hipped negress: "Est-ce qu'il y à la messe à la Cathédrale demain?" to receive the impudent answer:
"Sainte Pitie! Est-çe que vous croire que le va levé apres so' bon diner au poisson pou' vini donner nous autres la sainte messe? Bon Dieu la Sainte Vierge! Ha! Ha!"
"Holy Mother! But it is French, en glacé,—crushed, with the cream swimming and the flavor heightened!"
Todd alone stared out across the dim, majestic river through De Soto's eyes. He tried to feel himself the man, to prophesy as that seer had prophesied. The great city and the long levees were builded in that vanished mind, before the first adobe brick was moulded, or the first dark cedar hewn. Now in himself, as Todd the new American minister, he felt the country of his dreams creep nearer, lured by the magnet of the Panama Canal. Within his own life, should God be pleased to spare him to a fair old age, new craft would thread the Mississippi delta, small merchantmen at first, and sailing vessels, each with the banner of the red sun on its mast. Asiatic labor, silent, skilful, insidious, would contest for preeminence with the saturnine Dago, the "cayjin," the Quadroon, and the established African.
Each moment, westward from the city, held a novelty and a delight. The sugar-fields of Louisiana, stretching for leaden-colored miles, and soon to be pierced by myriad tiny spears of awakening green, appeared to Yuki a giant sort of rice-field from her own land.
"If it were cut up into many small piece, all of different shape and size, with little crooked baby-levees binding the edges,—it would be exacterlee the winter rice-fields of Nippon."