the old French colonial days the uncertainty of supplies from the mother country had rendered it almost a necessity of existence: under the ironclad tariff policy of Spain it was quite a necessity. By the time of the cession of the territory to the United States, smuggling prices and smuggling relations had been so long established in the community that they had become a part of the habits of life there. The prices of smuggled goods were far cheaper than they could possibly have been if the customs duties had been levied upon them, and the relations with the purveyors of cheap goods were, what they will always be between consumers and purveyors of cheap goods, confidential and intimate; and there was in addition a general feeling that a laudable principle of conservatism and independence, rather than otherwise, was shown in ignoring the American pretensions of moral superiority over the old standard.
And from time immemorial, Barataria had been associated with pirates, privateers, contrabandists and smugglers. It will be remembered that Barataria was the name of the island presented by the frolicsome duchess to Sancho Panza, for his sins, as he learned to consider it. How or when the name came to Louisiana is still to be discovered, whether directly from Don Quixote, or from the source which supplied LeSage with it, the etymology of the word; Baratear, meaning cheap, Barato, cheap things. The name includes all the Gulf coast of Louisiana between the mouth of the Mississippi and the mouth of the Bayou LaFourche, a considerable stream and the waterway of a rich and populous territory. A thin strip of an island, Grand Terre, six miles long and three wide, screens from the Gulf the great Bay of Barataria, whose entrance is a pass with a con-
