dismayed. He had never heard of hero-worship or
free-thinking before, but did not doubt their atrocity. It had never
occurred to him that a man with a few spelling-books and elementary
readers could be so dangerous to society.

"I wish he clear out from yondeh," said Catou. He really made his
short responses in French, but in a French best indicated in bad
English.

"Not for my sake," replied the priest, coldly smiling. "I shall just
preach somewhere else on the thirteenth Sunday of each quarter, and
let Grande Pointe go to the devil; for there is where your new friend
is sure to land you. Good-day, I am very busy this morning."

These harsh words--harsh barking of the shepherd dog--spread an unseen
consternation in Grande Pointe. Maximian was not greatly concerned.
When he heard of the threat to cut off the spiritual table-crumbs with
which the villagers had so scantily been fed, he only responded that
in his opinion the dominie was no such a fool as that. But others
could not so easily dismiss their fears. They began to say privately,
leaning on fences and lingering at stiles, that they had felt from the
very day of that first mad bell-ringing that the whole movement was
too headlong; that this opening the sluices of English education would
make trouble. Children shouldn't be taught what their parents do not
understand. Not that there was special harm in a little spelling,
adding, or subtracting, but--the notions they and the teacher
produced! Here was the school's influence going through all the place
like the waters of a rising tide. All Grande Pointe was lifting from
the sands, and in danger of getting afloat and drifting toward the
current of the great world's life. Personally, too, the schoolmaster
seemed harmless enough. From the children and he loving each other,
the hearts of the seniors had become entangled. The children had come
home from the atmosphere of that old tobacco-shed, and persuaded the
very grandmothers to understand vaguely--very vaguely and dimly--that
the day of liberty which had come to the world at large a hundred
years before had come at last to them; that in France their race had
been peasants; in Acadia, forsaken colonists; in Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, exiles alien to the land, the
language, and the times; in St. Domingo, penniless, sick, unwelcome
refugees; and for just one century in Louisiana the jest of the proud
Creole, held down by the triple fetter of illi