The two captives were made guests.  Listening Crane rejoiced in them as representatives of the great gift-making race, and indulged himself in a dream of pipe-smoking, orations, treaties, presents and alliances, finding its climax in the marriage of his virgin queen to the king of France, and unvaryingly tending to the swiftly increasing aggrandizement of Listening Crane.  They sat down to bear’s meat, sagamite and beans.  The queen sat down with them, clothed in her entire wardrobe:  vest of swan’s skin, with facings of purple and green from the neck of the mallard; petticoat of plaited hair, with embroideries of quills; leggings of fawn-skin; garters of wampum; black and green serpent-skin moccasins, that rested on pelts of tiger-cat and buffalo; armlets of gars’ scales, necklaces of bears’ claws and alligators’ teeth, plaited tresses, plumes of raven and flamingo, wing of the pink curlew, and odors of bay and sassafras.  Young men danced before them, blowing upon reeds, hooting, yelling, rattling beans in gourds and touching hands and feet.  One day was like another, and the nights were made brilliant with flambeau dances and processions.

Some days later M. D’Iberville’s canoe fleet, returning down the river, found and took from the shore the two men, whom they had given up for dead, and with them, by her own request, the abdicating queen, who left behind her a crowd of weeping and howling squaws and warriors.  Three canoes that put off in their wake, at a word from her, turned back; but one old man leaped into the water, swam after them a little way, and then unexpectedly sank.  It was that cautious wader but inexperienced swimmer, the Listening Crane.

When the expedition reached Biloxi, there were two suitors for the hand of Agricola’s great ancestress.  Neither of them was Zephyr Grandissime.  (Ah! the strong heads of those Grandissimes.)

They threw dice for her.  Demosthenes De Grapion—­he who, tradition says, first hoisted the flag of France over the little fort—­seemed to think he ought to have a chance, and being accorded it, cast an astonishingly high number; but Epaminondas cast a number higher by one (which Demosthenes never could quite understand), and got a wife who had loved him from first sight.

Thus, while the pilgrim fathers of the Mississippi Delta with Gallic recklessness were taking wives and moot-wives from the ill specimens of three races, arose, with the church’s benediction, the royal house of the Fusiliers in Louisiana.  But the true, main Grandissime stock, on which the Fusiliers did early, ever, and yet do, love to marry, has kept itself lily-white ever since France has loved lilies—­as to marriage, that is; as to less responsible entanglements, why, of course—­

After a little, the disappointed Demosthenes, with due ecclesiastical sanction, also took a most excellent wife, from the first cargo of House of Correction girls.  Her biography, too, is as short as Methuselah’s, or shorter; she died.  Zephyr Grandissime married, still later, a lady of rank, a widow without children, sent from France to Biloxi under a lettre de cachet.  Demosthenes De Grapion, himself an only son, left but one son, who also left but one.  Yet they were prone to early marriages.