It was altogether supposable that they would have spread out broadly in the land; but they were such inveterate duelists, such brave Indian-fighters, such adventurous swamp-rangers, and such lively free-livers, that, however numerously their half-kin may have been scattered about in an unacknowledged way, the avowed name of De Grapion had become less and less frequent in lists where leading citizens subscribed their signatures, and was not to be seen in the list of managers of the late ball.
It is not at all certain that so hot a blood would not have boiled away entirely before the night of the _bal masque_, but for an event which led to the union of that blood with a stream equally clear and ruddy, but of a milder vintage.

This event fell out some fifty-two years after that cast of the dice which made the princess Lufki-Humma the mother of all the Fusiliers and of none of the De Grapions.

Clotilde, the Casket-Girl, the little maid who would not marry, was one of an heroic sort, worth--the De Grapions maintained--whole swampfuls of Indian queens.

And yet the portrait of this great ancestress, which served as a pattern to one who, at the ball, personated the long-deceased heroine _en masque_, is hopelessly lost in some garret.

Those Creoles have such a shocking way of filing their family relics and records in rat-holes.
One fact alone remains to be stated: that the De Grapions, try to spurn it as they would, never could quite suppress a hard feeling in the face of the record, that from the two young men, who, when lost in the horrors of Louisiana's swamps, had been esteemed as good as dead, and particularly from him who married at his leisure,--from Zephyr de Grandissime,--sprang there so many as the sands of the Mississippi innumerable..