Not far off was the little log church, where one good Father
Beret, or as named by the Indians, who all loved him, Father
Blackrobe, performed the services of his sacred calling; and
scattered all around were the cabins of traders, soldiers and
woodsmen forming a queer little town, the like of which cannot now
be seen anywhere on the earth.
It is not known just when Vincennes was first founded; but most
historians make the probable date very early in the eighteenth
century, somewhere between 1710 and 1730. In 1810 the Roussillon
cherry tree was thought by a distinguished botanical letter-
writer to be at least fifty years old, which would make the date
of its planting about 1760. Certainly as shown by the time-stained
family records upon which this story of ours is based, it was a
flourishing and wide-topped tree in early summer of 1778, its
branches loaded to drooping with luscious fruit. So low did the
dark red clusters hang at one point that a tall young girl
standing on the ground easily reached the best ones and made her
lips purple with their juice while she ate them.
That was long ago, measured by what has come to pass on the gentle
swell of rich country from which Vincennes overlooks the Wabash.
The new town flourishes notably and its appearance marks the
latest limit of progress. Electric cars in its streets, electric
lights in its beautiful homes, the roar of railway trains coming
and going in all directions, bicycles whirling hither and thither,
the most fashionable styles of equipages, from brougham to pony-
phaeton, make the days of flint-lock guns and buckskin trousers
seem ages down the past; and yet we are looking back over but a
little more than a hundred and twenty years to see Alice
Roussillon standing under the cherry tree and holding high a
tempting cluster of fruit, while a very short, hump-backed youth
looks up with longing eyes and vainly reaches for it.
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