The summer broke on that sunny land; and in the cool morning twilight, and after nightfall, Antoine lingered by the grave.  He could never be with it enough.

One morning he observed a delicate stem, with two curiously shaped emerald leaves, springing up from the centre of the mound.  At first he merely noticed it casually; but at length the plant grew so tall, and was so strangely unlike anything he had ever seen before, that he examined it with care.

How straight and graceful and exquisite it was!  When it swung to and fro with the summer wind, in the twilight, it seemed to Antoine as if little Anglice were standing there in the garden!

The days stole by, and Antoine tended the fragile shoot, wondering what sort of blossom it would unfold, white, or scarlet, or golden.  One Sunday, a stranger, with a bronzed, weather-beaten face like a sailor’s, leaned over the garden-rail, and said to him,—­

“What a fine young date-palm you have there, Sir!”

“Mon Dieu!” cried Pere Antoine, “and is it a palm?”

“Yes, indeed,” returned the man.  “I had no idea the tree would flourish in this climate.”

“Mon Dieu!” was all the priest could say.

If Pere Antoine loved the tree before, he worshipped it now.  He watered it, and nurtured it, and could have clasped it in his arms.  Here were Emile and Anglice and the child, all in one!

The years flew by, and the date-palm and the priest grew together,—­only one became vigorous and the other feeble.  Pere Antoine had long passed the meridian of life.  The tree was in its youth.  It no longer stood in an isolated garden; for homely brick and wooden houses had clustered about Antoine’s cottage.  They looked down scowling on the humble thatched roof.  The city was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land.  But he clung to it, and wouldn’t sell.  Speculators piled gold on his door-step, and he laughed at them.  Sometimes he was hungry, but he laughed none the less.

“Get thee behind me, Satan!” said the old priest’s smile.

Pere Antoine was very old now, scarcely able to walk; but he could sit under the pliant, caressing leaves of his tree, and there he sat until the grimmest of speculators came to him.  But even in death Pere Antoine was faithful to his trust.  The owner of that land loses it, if he harms the date-tree.

And there it stands in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful, dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamored.  A precious boon is she to the wretched city; and when loyal men again walk those streets, may the hand wither that touches her ungently!

“Because it grew from the heart of little Anglice,” said Miss Badeau, tenderly.

* * * * *

“SOLID OPERATIONS IN VIRGINIA”: 

OR, ’T IS EIGHTY YEARS SINCE.