“’Sieur Frowenfel’,” said Aurora, as he raised his hat for good-day, “you din come home yet.”

He did not understand until he had crimsoned and answered he knew not what—­something about having intended every day.  He felt lifted he knew not where, Paradise opened, there was a flood of glory, and then he was alone; the ladies, leaving adieus sweeter than the perfume they carried away with them, floated into the south and were gone.  Why was it that the elder, though plainly regarded by the younger with admiration, dependence, and overflowing affection, seemed sometimes to be, one might almost say, watched by her?  He liked Aurora the better.

On his return to the shop his friend remarked that if he received many such visitors as the one who had called during his absence, he might be permitted to be vain.  It was Honore Grandissime, and he had left no message.

“Frowenfeld,” said his friend, “it would pay you to employ a regular assistant.”

Joseph was in an abstracted mood.

“I have some thought of doing so.”

Unlucky slip!  As he pushed open his door next morning, what was his dismay to find himself confronted by some forty men.  Five of them leaped up from the door-sill, and some thirty-five from the edge of the trottoir, brushed that part of their wearing-apparel which always fits with great neatness on a Creole, and trooped into the shop.  The apothecary fell behind his defences, that is to say, his prescription desk, and explained to them in a short and spirited address that he did not wish to employ any of them on any terms.  Nine-tenths of them understood not a word of English; but his gesture was unmistakable.  They bowed gratefully, and said good-day.

Now Frowenfeld did these young men an injustice; and though they were far from letting him know it, some of them felt it and interchanged expressions of feeling reproachful to him as they stopped on the next corner to watch a man painting a sign.  He had treated them as if they all wanted situations.  Was this so?  Far from it.  Only twenty men were applicants; the other twenty were friends who had come to see them get the place.  And again, though, as the apothecary had said, none of them knew anything about the drug business—­no, nor about any other business under the heavens—­they were all willing that he should teach them—­except one.  A young man of patrician softness and costly apparel tarried a moment after the general exodus, and quickly concluded that on Frowenfeld’s account it was probably as well that he could not qualify, since he was expecting from France an important government appointment as soon as these troubles should be settled and Louisiana restored to her former happy condition.  But he had a friend—­a cousin—­whom he would recommend, just the man for the position; a splendid fellow; popular, accomplished—­what? the best trainer of dogs that M. Frowenfeld might ever hope to look upon; a “so good fisherman