time for sailing should arrive, and the number
of passengers was only restricted by two
circumstances, one of which was, that the rate of
fare demanded was considerable, and the other,
that Captain Harrison was strict in his scrutiny
of his would-be guests, and declined to encumber
his cabins with either "loafers" or suspected
spies.

I remember well, on the very day on which
we were to go on board and await the land
breeze to waft us smoothly out of harbour,
under cover of the darkness, that a tap, a
hesitating, timid tap, resounded against the panels
of my door, the door of my room in Willing's
Hotel. I was sitting alone in the wooden
balcony, under the striped awning that kept off
the rays of the almost tropical sun, meditating,
as I discussed my cigar, on the strange nature
of the affair in which I found myself engaged.
There was a singular dash of lawlessness about
the business that contrasted oddly with the usual
tenor of our quiet Lombard-street life, and the
very idea of having to steal away, secretly and
under cloud of night, from Nassau, was
anything but agreeable to a man of orderly and
peaceful habits. However, I recollected the
helpless children and their almost equally
dependent mother, for whose safety I was
responsible, and I consoled myself with the hope that
in a very few days at most my duty would be
discharged, and the danger past. I had got so
far in my musings when the tap I have mentioned
caused me to turn my face towards the
door, and in answer to my summons to "Come
in," a strange figure presented itself in my
apartment.

The intruder was a tall, corpulent old man,
in the costume of a Roman Catholic priest, but
of so antiquated and grotesque a fashion that I
found it extremely hard to suppress a smile as
its wearer approached me, bowing and smiling
with oily deference. His twinkling black eyes
were meekly lowered as they met mine, and from
the huge shovel-hat that he carried in one
sunburnt hand, the knotted fingers of which were
adorned with silver rings, down to the black
cotton stockings and square-toed shoes that
protected his feet, the visitor might have sat for
the portrait of a French village curé of the time
of Louis the Fifteenth. And a curé he was,
as well as I could gather from the perplexing
jargon of mingled French and Spanish, eked out
by a few oddly pronounced English phrases, in
which he addressed me. His name, he told me,
was the Padre or Père (for he used both terms
indifferently) Duchochois, Antoine Duchochois,
parish priest of St. Gaspard, a village in
Louisiana, in that wild region of unhealthy
morasses that is called the Bayou Teche country.
This district, as I was aware, neither Butler nor
Banks had proved able to subdue to the Federal
sway, and there my new acquaintance had the
spiritual charge of a poor and primitive
population, who lived chiefly by fishing and the
culture of rice among the swampy fields. Very
few of the padre's parishioners, white, red, or
black, could speak anything but French or
Spanish, for even the seigneur to whom the
estate belonged by charter was a genuine Creole
colonist of the old stamp, and on this ground M.
Duchochois begged me to excuse his ignorance
of English, which it, was rarely necessary for
him to use.

But the poor padre's tale was a pitiful one.
He had been on a tour which he called a
"quête," and which was, in fact, a prolonged
begging excursion on behalf of his needy flock,
since the scanty substance of these simple
people had been wantonly destroyed by a party
of Federal foragers, who had burned all that
they could not carry off, and the coasting vessel
in which the priest had embarked had been run
down by an English brig on its return voyage
from Matamoras to New Providence. The
captain of the merchantman had done all that could
be expected of him in setting the padre ashore
at Nassau, and in giving him a few dollars by
way of compensation for his slender stock of
wearing apparel, which had gone to the bottom
of the sea. But poor M. Duchochois was in
much perplexity, anxious to get back to his parish
and his people, sore afraid of the Yankees, whom
he seemed to regard as devouring dragons, and
quite unable to raise the funds needful to pay
for a passage for himself and his Indian servant-
boy, Blaise, to South Carolina. Once there, the
curé had no doubt that from priest to priest, and
from convent to convent, he could get passed on
to his own rustic dwelling-place; but in Nassau,
where all were absorbed in the gainful traffic of
the hour, and where few could even understand
his speech, the unfortunate ecclesiastic was quite
at a loss.

In this strait, hearing that I was an Englishman,
and reading, as he was polite enough to
say, some hope in my face, poor M. Duchochois
had come to throw himself on my compassion.
Would I kindly use my influence with some
ship-captain to convey him and his boy Blaise
over to the continent? They would not be
troublesome passengers. They would ranger
themselves, they would creep into some hole or
corner on board the ship, and remain as quiet
and unobtrusive as mice. They would not ask
for anything more than permission to occupy a
little space on board the vessel. A little biscuit
and a melon or two they could take on board
with them—bah! a bagatelle! they should cost
the honourable captain nothing for their
subsistence. And for their passage the padre
would pay in prayers and an old man's blessing,
for which, at any rate, M. le Capitaine Anglais
would be none the worse. Would I intercede
for him?

Now the curé was a grotesque personage in
appearance, and he looked inconceivably
ridiculous as he squeezed his portly person into a
corner of the room by way of exemplifying his
intention to "effacer" himself when on board.
And when I thought of so fleshy a churchman
subsisting on water-melon and dry biscuit, I felt
a thrill of the same incredulity as that which
was experienced by the Black Knight in Ivanhoe
when Friar Tuck began to munch the dried peas.