Alice of Old Vincennes

								

long as I live, and I will never cease to beg the Holy Virgin to
intercede for you and lead you to the Holy Church."
He turned and went away; but when he was no farther than the gate,
Alice called out:
"O Father Beret, I forgot to show you something!"
She ran forth to him and added in a low tone:
"You know that Madame Roussillon has hidden all the novels from me."
She was fumbling to get something out of the loose front of her dress.
"Well, just take a glance at this, will you?" and she showed him a
little leather bound volume, much cracked along the hinges of the back.
It was Manon Lescaut, that dreadful romance by the famous Abbe Prevost.
Pere Beret frowned and went his way shaking his head; but before he
reached his little hut near the church he was laughing in spite of
himself.
"She's not so bad, not so bad," he thought aloud, "it's only her young,
independent spirit taking the bit for a wild run. In her sweet soul she
is as good as she is pure."

CHAPTER II
A LETTER FROM AFAR

Although Father Beret was for many years a missionary on the Wabash,
most of the time at Vincennes, the fact that no mention of him can be
found in the records is not stranger than many other things connected
with the old town's history. He was, like nearly all the men of his
calling in that day, a self-effacing and modest hero, apparently quite
unaware that he deserved attention. He and Father Gibault, whose name
is so beautifully and nobly connected with the stirring achievements of
Colonel George Rogers Clark, were close friends and often companions.
Probably Father Gibault himself, whose fame will never fade, would have
been to-day as obscure as Father Beret, but for the opportunity given
him by Clark to fix his name in the list of heroic patriots who
assisted in winning the great Northwest from the English.
Vincennes, even in the earliest days of its history, somehow kept up
communication and, considering the circumstances, close relations with
New Orleans. It was much nearer Detroit; but the Louisiana colony stood
next to France in the imagination and longing of priests, voyageurs,
coureurs de bois and reckless adventurers who had Latin blood in their
veins. Father Beret first came to Vincennes from New Orleans, the
voyage up the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash, in a pirogue, lasting
through a whole summer and far into the autumn. Since his arrival the
post had experienced many vicissitudes, and at the time in which our
story opens the British government claimed right of dominion over the
great territory drained by the Wabash, and, indeed, over a large,
indefinitely outlined part of the North American continent lying above
Mexico; a claim just then being vigorously questioned, flintlock in
hand, by the Anglo-American colonies.
Of course the handful of French people at Vincennes, so far away from
every center of information, and wholly occupied with their trading,