wife, in the very bloom of her matronly beauty, is still one of the fairest ornaments of her brilliant circle.
A year after Marie's nuptials, the attachment which had quietly grown up between her mother and Mr. Beman, but which had never been expressed, was spoken and acknowledged; and when she had given a few more months to her weeds, in the beginning of the Christmas feasts, she exchanged them for new bridal ornaments.
The light-hearted and amiable Monsieur Maillefert and his kind and active spouse have both gone to their rest; but a son and a daughter faithfully bring down their memories, and honor them by blameless lives.
But two of our dramatis persona remain to be accounted for; the elder and younger Le Vert.
The former settled up the business of his administration, without interference from any quarter, and, it is to be hoped, to his own satisfaction. His trade was rapidly increased, and streams of affluence poured in upon him for several years, precisely as if his capital had been honestly acquired. But the evil propensities of his son, developed by enlarged means of dissipation, were a fountain of bitterness in his later years; and the consequences of a brawl, in which the latter had committed a homicide, during one of his annual visits to New-Orleans, gave a blow to both the health and fortune of the former, from which he never recovered. Napoleon escaped the penalty of his crime; but it was at the cost of nearly all his father's hard-earned and ill-gotten gains; and as, after this, the elder sank rapidly into poverty and imbecility, the younger speedily reached the depths to which gambling and drunkenness drag their votaries. He finally died in a disgraceful rencontre in the streets of the same city where he had so narrowly escaped a death but little different.
The quaint old town of Kaskaskia still holds a place upon the map; and light hearts and simple lives are as numerous there as ever. She has long been overshadowed by her neighbors; but if, in her quiet streets, she miss the active bustle of the marts of commerce, and lose something of the exhilaration of enterprise, she gains far more in amiable cheerfulness, whose calm is not broken by the heated passions, and sordid schemes of more engrossing pursuits.
