trained gentlewomen be provided as teachers for the daughters of the principaux of New Orleans. The education of the sons had presented no difficulty: they could be sent to France or, if the parents were poor, boys could attend schools conducted by the priests. But, says a chronicler, no mother would send her young daughters so far from home to be absent during the years when they most needed a mother's care; and the priests' schools were not open to girls.

Recognizing that the health of all his colonists and the contentment of the better and more stable classes must be preserved, Bienville determined to solve both problems at the same time by inviting a religious order of women to establish themselves permanently in New Orleans. Naturally enough, he thought first of the sœurs grises of his native Canada, but he was unsuccessful in his efforts to enlist their interest; and by the advice of Père Beaubois (the lately arrived Superior of the Jesuits), he next applied to the Ursulines of Rouen. Their ready acquiescence, however, was not the conclusion of the whole matter. The projected undertaking did not concern Bienville and the good sisters alone. The Compagnie des Indes must be consulted and persuaded and enlightened; and a formal treaty must be drawn up by the Company, submitted to the Ursuline authorities, and, if accepted by them, it must be signed by the officers of the Company and by the Superior of the Ursuline order in France as well as by the Superior of the little group of religious people who had agreed to go on the mission to New Orleans.

Now the corporation known as the Compagnie des Indes offers many a spectacular incident in history and economics; but in the arrangements with the Ursulines it appears prosaic only. The twenty-eight Articles of the contract are concerned with passage and pensions and the day's work: there is no recognition of spiritual ideals or ambitions, or of the unprecedented nature of the enterprise. A matter-of-fact reading of the Treaty makes the Company's point of view quite clear in regard to the projected school. Present-day New Orleans is apt to think that the reason for the coming of the Ursulines was primarily to teach girls; but the Treaty is a document in evidence to show that the

Company gave slight thought to that occupation. It was the hospital alone that interested the Company, as may be seen from the fact that only two Articles (a part of the Sixth, and the Twenty-fourth) out of the entire twenty-eight deal specifically with the education of girls. It is even especially enjoined upon the religious that though they may, when circumstances warrant it, receive boarding pupils, the Sisters in charge of the sick must never be detached from the hospital service. Clearly the Company intended the Ursulines to be sick-nurses, and if they should be teachers also, that occupation would be merely "for lagniappe," as we say in New Orleans to-day.

The Ursulines made no objection to the Company's provisions, and after a prodigal waste of red tape (one loop of which touched Cardinal Fleury and even Louis XV himself), the contract was concluded September 13, 1726. On February 23, 1727, ten Ursulines, two priests, servants, and a few workmen set sail in the Gironde.

That we know all manner of details in regard to the five months' voyage is due to the literary skill and the personal qualities of the Mother Superior, Sister Marie Tranchepain (delightful name), and of her secretary, Marie Madeleine Hachard, a novice at the inception of the mission but soon a member of the order. Both women had keen intelligence, an eye for significant detail, and a sense of humor. If, as we have been told, it is seldom possible to discover the time, place, and loved one forming an harmonious whole, it is equally rare that religious zeal, a sense of humor, and a literary artist are united. But spiritual enthusiasm, the voyage of the Gironde, and Mme. Tranchepain and Madeleine Hachard were made for one another. Things happened on that journey across seas, and the women who recorded the events or incidents knew how to observe, how to judge, how to put their impressions into written words. No day, apparently, was commonplace, but the happenings varied, of course, in degree and kind. Mme. Tranchepain may note mildly: "Ce fut alors que chacun commença à payer le tribut à la mer"; or she may observe that the regularity with which the soup upsets seems to be intentional; or there may be a goodnatured gibe at the self-effacing novice (Madeleine Hachard, as

it happened) who carried the community principle so far that she persisted in referring to her own features as "our nose" or "our ear." But there are, too, pages that tell graphically of threatened attacks from pirate ships, of hurricanes; there are allusions to cannibal islands; there is casual mention of a scarcity of food and drink.

The little company probably drew a sigh of relief when the mouth of the Mississippi was sighted, though the entrance to the great river must have been then, as it is to-day, a depressing view. For some miles before the thin wavering gray line of marsh appears on the horizon, an incoming ship moves through heavy yellow water whose dullness of hue is especially noticeable after a voyager has for days been surrounded by the vivid blue of the gulf or the green blue of the Atlantic. The gray line on the horizon becomes steadier and finally resolves itself into a fringe of brownish-green rushes through which the muddy waters rise and fall almost as freely as out in the open gulf. At one spot the marsh separates to make a way, apparently, along which the insistent, heaving, tawny waters may sweep into the dim, mysterious wastes that are "land" only by geographical courtesy. It often appears, too, to be only geographical courtesy that permits the statement: "the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico," for the tide rolls far within the level, tortuous passage grudgingly relinquished by the marshes. One would expect the mouth of as mighty a body as the Father of Waters to be an impressive sweep of open space through which a hurtling, spray-tossed current would burst with a deafening roar into the sea beyond. But, on the contrary, the Mississippi avoids a climax at its conclusion (though not averse to spectacular actions farther up its course), and the river slips into the gulf by five passageways so clogged with sandbars that it is a wonder the waters succeed in escaping at all. Nowadays, the jetties force the current to scour a channel through one of these passageways, but jetties are inconspicuous taskmasters and consequently have done little to alter the appearance of the entrance to the river.

Outside one of the passes the passengers of the Gironde waited until arrangements could be concluded for the last section

of the journey, which because of the sandbars at the entrance of the river must be made in small boats. To-day it is for the quarantine officer and the river pilot that we wait and, save for the little white cottage standing up on low stilts and the big white lighthouse on high ones, we see just what those long-ago pioneers saw: dun-colored waters beneath, blinding light above, and a flat, unchanging stretch of dullest green that reaches to the very edge of the world. The travelers left the Gironde gladly, we may be sure, though they left it to spend seven days in pirogues. To travel in a pirogue is at any time an uneasy experience for the amateur, but to travel in a pirogue piled high with wobbly luggage on which the passenger perches unhappily while someone stands and aimlessly (and, to all appearances, ineffectively) dips a paddle in the water is a real test of flesh, spirit, and specific gravity. Moreover, it should be remembered that the pirogues were being paddled against the current of the Mississippi river, and, too, that the trip was made in the month of August. There were days, so the records tell, of scorching sun and torrential rain; and nights spent on a land that was two parts water and a third part mosquitoes. But the Journal of the Mother Superior and the letters of her secretary do not dwell on discomforts; rather is the emphasis laid on the wonder of the broad yellow river and the strange, low-lying shores, where after the first two days moss-draped cypress trees began to take the place of the reeds and grass. And Madeleine can even speak tolerantly of the unceasing and ferocious attacks of Messieurs les Maringouins, or Frappe d'abords, as she calls the mosquitoes, usually adding a conjecture as to whether they really will succeed in “assassinating" her.

In the latter part of August, 1727, the Ursulines finally reached New Orleans, thereby concluding the necessary preliminaries for opening a school for girls in Bienville's city. The history of few schools can afford so interesting an introduction. This introduction should belong equally, of course, to the opening of a hospital, but it does not so belong because, in spite of the fact that the Company had definitely proposed that the hospital should be first and the school last, circumstances quite as definitely disposed that the last, in this case, should be first.

One of these circumstances, for example, had decreed that the hôtel of Bienville to which the religious were escorted by Governor Perier (Bienville had returned to France in the hope of justifying his management of the colony) should chance to be at the end of town farthest from the building that sheltered the "pauvres malades" to whom the benevolent Company had dedicated the services of the Ursulines; and it was absolutely necessary to wait until a residence should be provided near the hospital before complete and organized service could begin.1

But, on the other hand, circumstances also decreed that more than thirty girls should be desirous of being received as boarders, and that many day pupils should be waiting anxiously to take advantage of the Sixth and Twenty-fourth articles of the Treaty. The school was inevitably started at once, and, it may be added, expanded at once, for besides the expected well-bred pupils and the regular convent instruction offered them, negresses and savages were received every day from one o'clock to two-thirty and were taught French, religion, and something of what we to-day should call the rudiments of domestic science. At once, too, the Sisters took into their home an orphan whom they found in special need of protection; and they even sought to help the Manon Lescauts of the colony.

It is evident that neither climate nor strange conditions affected the energies of these extraordinary women. Only eight months after their arrival, Madeleine Hachard writes to her father that the Ursulines are carrying on the activities of four communities: of their own, of course; of hospitalières; of St. Joseph; of a Refuge. Furthermore, they were soon called upon to act as guardians for the filles-à-la-cassette, those completely respectable maidens who were carefully selected by the ever alert Compagnie des Indes, provided with a dowry, and then sent across the ocean and up the Mississippi (in pirogues) to be the wives of the single and worthy young men of New Orleans. Still another responsibility was laid upon the Ursulines when, in 1729,

'The hospital work was begun before the first year of residence was over, and it was as faithfully performed as conscience, kindness, and the Treaty could ask. In 1770, a papal dispensation released the Ursulines from the hospital service.