Ah, Bossu . . . so he was gone! . . . buried a month ago, they said. Old Bossu, last but one of all those thirty-five shipmates who had come out to Pakarae from Havre upon La Belle Etoile, fifty-one years ago. Fifty-one years is a long time. They had built, those early settlers, that curving street of quaint, two-storeyed, gabled houses so much prettier than New Zealand houses are wont to be; they had planted the walnut-trees and willows, the peaches and poplars and the vines: they had bequeathed to this little, out-of-the-way angle of British territory its subtle, still persistent “foreign” flavour; and now they were all lying, all, all but one, very far away from Provence and Savoy, with white stones at their heads, in the little cemetery yonder, underneath the sighing pines.
Certainly they had left children; the old names were still to be seen upon the corners of the streets, and above shop-doors. But they were barbarously mispronounced, these names; and, as for the children, who had grown up in this, the country of their birth, they were all British now—there was to be found among them scarcely one who could make shift to stammer, and that with an accent truly frightful, three syllables of his father’s tongue. For the last five years, Philippe and Bossu had been the last remaining representatives of “la patrie,” the sole survivors of the “Originals.” . . . And Bossu now was gone!
Yes, he was gone! Here, halfway up the street, was his house, all shut up. The green shutters—Bossu’s was the only house that had retained the gay green shutters of Home—were fast closed; springing grasses, and darkly shining wreaths of
