ANTONIO DE SEDILLA, better known as " Pare Antoine," clergyman, born in Spain about 1730; died in New Orleans in 1829. He was sent to Louisiana as commissary of the inquisition, with power to put it in force in that colony, and arrived there, with five other Capuchin friars, in 1779. The governor, Miro, fearing a revolution if the Spanish laws against heretics were applied, forcibly seized Fra Antonio and the other monks and sent them back to Spain. Four years later Pare Antoine, as he came to be called, returned to New Orleans in the capacity of priest of St. Louis cathedral, the only Church in the City, and his goodness and charity made him the idol of the French population during his long pastorate. He gave all that he had to the poor and lived a life of the greatest abstemiousness, sleeping on hard boards in a rude hut that he constructed under a date-palm tree that stood in his garden. When the United States purchased Louisiana, Claiborne wrote to Jefferson that no opposition to the new dominion need be feared if Pare Antoine could be won over. The president solicited his interest; but the old priest took no part in the crisis, refusing to meddle with polities. The palm-tree under which he lived and died became, in memory of the good father, a famous landmark in New Orleans. It was said to have been planted by a Turk in 1727; but Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Second Visit to New Orleans," asserts that Pare Antoine planted it himself. Dimitry and Lafeadro Hearn made the tree the subject of Aldrich's story of "Pare Antoine's Date Palm," and of romances. 3Iany traditions associated with the tree are given in Gayarre's "History of Louisiana." It bloomed for the last time in 1853, but retained some life and verdure until in July 1886, it was entirely dead.