I want to see how long it will take him to find out the rest." The Place d'Armes offered amusement to every one else rather than to the immigrant.

The family relation, the most noticeable feature of its' well-pleased groups, was to him too painful a reminder of his late losses, and, after an honest endeavor to flutter out of the inner twilight of himself into the outer glare of a moving world, he had given up the effort and had passed beyond the square and seated himself upon a rude bench which encircled the trunk of a willow on the levee.
The negress, who, resting near by with a tray of cakes before her, has been for some time contemplating the three-quarter face of her unconscious neighbor, drops her head at last with a small, Ethiopian, feminine laugh.

It is a self-confession that, pleasant as the study of his countenance is, to resolve that study into knowledge is beyond her powers; and very pardonably so it is, she being but a _marchande des gateaux_ (an itinerant cake-vender), and he, she concludes, a man of parts.

There is a purpose, too, as well as an admission, in the laugh.
She would like to engage him in conversation.

But he does not notice.
Little supposing he is the object of even a cake-merchant's attention, he is lost in idle meditation.
One would guess his age to be as much as twenty-six.