Alice of Old Vincennes

								

French days, a low, rambling cabin surrounded by rude verandas
overgrown with grapevines. This was the Roussillon place, the most
pretentious home in all the Wabash country. Its owner was Gaspard
Roussillon, a successful trader with the Indians. He was rich, for the
time and the place, influential to a degree, a man of some education,
who had brought with him to the wilderness a bundle of books and a
taste for reading.
From faded letters and dimly remembered talk of those who once clung
fondly to the legends and traditions of old Vincennes, it is drawn that
the Roussillon cherry tree stood not very far away from the present
site of the Catholic church, on a slight swell of ground overlooking a
wide marshy flat and the silver current of the Wabash. If the tree grew
there, then there too stood the Roussillon house with its cosy log
rooms, its clay-daubed chimneys and its grapevine-mantled verandas,
while some distance away and nearer the river the rude fort with its
huddled officers' quarters seemed to fling out over the wild landscape,
through its squinting and lopsided port-holes, a gaze of stubborn
defiance.
Not far off was the little log church, where one good Father Beret, or
as named by the Indians, who all loved him, Father Blackrobe, performed
the services of his sacred calling; and scattered all around were the
cabins of traders, soldiers and woodsmen forming a queer little town,
the like of which cannot now be seen anywhere on the earth.
It is not known just when Vincennes was first founded; but most
historians make the probable date very early in the eighteenth century,
somewhere between 1710 and 1730. In 1810 the Roussillon cherry tree was
thought by a distinguished botanical letter-writer to be at least fifty
years old, which would make the date of its planting about 1760.
Certainly as shown by the time-stained family records upon which this
story of ours is based, it was a flourishing and wide-topped tree in
early summer of 1778, its branches loaded to drooping with luscious
fruit. So low did the dark red clusters hang at one point that a tall
young girl standing on the ground easily reached the best ones and made
her lips purple with their juice while she ate them.
That was long ago, measured by what has come to pass on the gentle
swell of rich country from which Vincennes overlooks the Wabash. The
new town flourishes notably and its appearance marks the latest limit
of progress. Electric cars in its streets, electric lights in its
beautiful homes, the roar of railway trains coming and going in all
directions, bicycles whirling hither and thither, the most fashionable
styles of equipages, from brougham to pony-phaeton, make the days of
flint-lock guns and buckskin trousers seem ages down the past; and yet
we are looking back over but a little more than a hundred and twenty
years to see Alice Roussillon standing under the cherry tree and