PERE ANTOINE’S DATE-PALM.

A LEGEND OF NEW ORLEANS.

I.

MISS BADEAU.

It is useless to disguise the fact:  Miss Badeau is a Rebel.

Mr. Beauregard’s cannon had not done battering the walls of Sumter, when Miss Badeau was packed up, labelled, and sent North, where she has remained ever since in a sort of aromatic, rose-colored state of rebellion.

She is not one of your blood-thirsty Rebels, you know; she has the good sense to shrink with horror from the bare mention of those heathen who, at Manassas and elsewhere, wreaked their unmanly spite on the bodies of dead heroes:  still she is a bitter little Rebel, with blonde hair, superb eyelashes, and two brothers in the Confederate service,—­if I may be allowed to club the statements.  When I look across the narrow strait of our boarding-house table, and observe what a handsome wretch she is, I begin to think that if Mr. Seward doesn’t presently take her in charge, I shall.

The preceding paragraphs have little or nothing to do with what I am going to relate:  they merely illustrate how wildly a fellow will write, when the eyelashes of a pretty woman get tangled with his pen.  So I let them stand,—­as a warning.

My exordium should have taken this shape:—­

“I hope and trust,” remarked Miss Badeau, in that remarkably scathing tone which she assumes in alluding to the U.S.V., “I hope and trust, that, when your five hundred thousand, more or less, men capture my New Orleans, they will have the good taste not to injure Pere Antoine’s Date-Palm.”

“Not a hair of its head shall be touched,” I replied, without having the faintest idea of what I was talking about.

“Ah!  I hope not,” she said.

There was a certain tenderness in her voice which struck me.

“Who is Pere Antoine?” I ventured to ask.  “And what is this tree that seems to interest you so?”

“I will tell you.”

Then Miss Badeau told me the following legend, which I think worth writing down.  If it should appear tame to the reader, it will be because I haven’t a black ribbed-silk dress, and a strip of point-lace around my throat, like Miss Badeau; it will be because I haven’t her eyes and lips and music to tell it with, confound me!

II.

THE LEGEND.

Near the levee (quay) and not far from the old French Cathedral, in New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, some thirty feet high, growing out in the open air as sturdily as if its roots were sucking sap from their native earth.  Sir Charles Lyell, in his “Second Visit to the United States,” mentions this exotic:—­“The tree is seventy or eighty years old; for Pere Antoine, a Roman Catholic priest, who died about twenty years ago, told Mr. Bringier that he planted it himself, when he was young.  In his will he provided that they who succeeded to this lot of ground should forfeit it, if they cut down the palm.”