Her eyes filled suddenly, and a short shower of tears rolled down the broad cheeks.  She pulled the shawl close about her.  The Marquis leaned slightly over in his saddle, and said—­

“It is very sad.  You have all my sympathy.  I shall speak to the Cure.  She was unquestionably insane, and the fall was accidental.  Millot says so distinctly.  Good-day, Madame.”

And he trotted off, thinking to himself:  “I must get this old woman appointed guardian of those idiots, and administrator of the farm.  It would be much better than having here one of those other Bacadous, probably a red republican, corrupting my commune.”

AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS

I

There were two white men in charge of the trading station.  Kayerts, the chief, was short and fat; Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs.  The third man on the staff was a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price.  However, for some reason or other, the natives down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck to him through all his wanderings about the country.  He spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits.  His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy.  Three children rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low, shed-like dwelling.  Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men.  He had charge of a small clay storehouse with a dried-grass roof, and pretended to keep a correct account of beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods it contained.  Besides the storehouse and Makola’s hut, there was only one large building in the cleared ground of the station.  It was built neatly of reeds, with a verandah on all the four sides.  There were three rooms in it.  The one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it.  The other two were the bedrooms for the white men.  Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture.  The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men.  There was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings.  In it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this; who had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress.  He had been, at home, an unsuccessful painter who, weary of pursuing fame on an empty stomach, had gone out there through high protections.  He had been the first chief of that station.  Makola had watched the energetic artist die of fever in the