and on to New Orleans, and were left swinging in the weather to insure the
peace and felicity of the land. Two other matters are all we need notice
for the ready comprehension of Françoise's story. Immigration was knocking
at every gate of the province, and citizen Étienne de Boré had just made
himself forever famous in the history of Louisiana by producing
merchantable sugar; land was going to be valuable, even back on the wild
prairies of Opelousas and Attakapas, where, twenty years before, the
Acadians,--the cousins of Evangeline,--wandering from far Nova Scotia, had
settled. Such was the region and such were the times when it began to be
the year 1795.

By good fortune one of the undestroyed fragments of Françoise's own
manuscript is its first page. She was already a grandmother forty-three
years old when in 1822 she wrote the tale she had so often told. Part of
the dedication to her only daughter and namesake--one line, possibly
two--has been torn off, leaving only the words, "ma fille unique a la
grasse [meaning 'grace'] de dieu [sic]," over her signature and the date,
"14 Julet [sic], 1822."




I.


THE TWO SISTERS.

It is to give pleasure to my dear daughter Fannie and to her children that
I write this journey. I shall be well satisfied if I can succeed in giving
them this pleasure: by the grace of God, Amen.