Many ease-loving old Frenchmen denied themselves the pleasure of following the day’s pageant from point to point, and chose the best of the vacant seats fronting the empty platform in the common meadow.  There they waited for speech-making to begin, smoking New Orleans tobacco, and stretching their wooden-shod feet in front of them.  No kind of covering intervened betwixt their gray heads and the sky’s fierce light, which made the rivers seem to wrinkle with fire.  An old Frenchman loved to feel heaven’s hand laid on his hair.  Sometimes they spoke to one another; but the most of each man’s soul was given to basking.  Their attitudes said:  “This is as far as I have lived.  I am not living to-morrow or next day.  The past has reached this instant as high-water mark, and here I rest.  Move me if you can.  I have arrived.”

Booths were set up along the route to the common meadow, where the thirsty and hungry might find food and drink; and as the crowd surged toward its destination, a babel of cries rose from the venders of these wares.  Father Baby was as great a huckster as any flatboat man of them all.  He outscreamed and outsweated Spaniards from Ste. Genevieve; and a sorry spectacle was he to Father Olivier when a Protestant circuit-rider pointed him out.  The itinerant had come to preach at early candle-lighting to the crowd of sinners which this occasion drew to Kaskaskia.  There was a flourishing chapel where this good preacher was esteemed, and his infrequent messages were gladly accepted.  He hated Romish practices, especially the Sunday dancing after mass, which Father Olivier allowed his humbler parishioners to indulge in.  They were such children.  When their week’s work was over and their prayers were said, they could scarcely refrain from kicking up their heels to the sound of a fiddle.

But when the preacher saw a friar peddling spirits, he determined to denounce Kaskaskia as Sodom and Gomorrah around his whole circuit in the American bottom lands.  While the fire burned in him he encountered Father Olivier, who despised him as a heretic, and respected him as a man.  Each revered the honest faith that was in the other, though they thought it their duty to quarrel.

“My friend,” exclaimed the preacher, “do you believe you are going in and out before this people in a God-fearing manner, when your colleague is yonder selling liquor?”

“Oh, that’s only poor half-crazy Father Baby.  He has no right even to the capote he wears.  Nobody minds him here.”

“He ought to be brought to his knees and soundly converted,” declared the evangelist.

“He is on his knees half the time now,” said Father Olivier mischievously.  “He’s religious enough, but, like you heretics, he perverts the truth to suit himself.”

The preacher laughed.  He was an unlearned man, but he had the great heart of an apostle, and was open to jokes.

“Do you think I am riding the wilderness for the pleasure of perverting the truth?”