teracy, poverty, and the
competition of unpaid, half-clad, swarming slaves. But that now the
slave was free, the school was free, and a new, wide, golden future
waited only on their education in the greatest language of the world.

All this was pleasant enough to accept even in a dim way, though too
good to be more than remotely grasped. But just when, as music in a
sleeper's ear, it is taking hold of their impulses somewhat, comes the
word of their hereditary dictator that this man is among them only for
their destruction. What could they reply? They were a people around
whom the entire world's thought had swirled and tumbled for four
hundred years without once touching them. Their ancestors had left
France before Descartes or Newton had begun to teach the modern world
to think. They knew no method of reasoning save by precedent, and had
never caught the faintest reflection from the mind of that great,
sweet thinker who said, "A stubborn retention of customs is a
turbulent thing, no less than the introduction of new." To such
strangers in the world of to-day now came the contemptuous challenge
of authority, defying them to prove that one who proposed to launch
them forth upon a sea of changes out of sight of all precedent and
tradition was not the hireling of some enemy's gold secretly paid to
sap the foundations of all their spiritual and temporal interests and
plunge them into chaos.

They blamed Bonaventure; he had got himself hated and them rebuked; it
was enough. They said little to each other and nothing to him; but
they felt the sleepy sense of injury we all know so well against one
who was disturbing their slumber; and some began to suspect and
distrust him, others to think hard of him for being suspected and
distrusted. Yet all this reached not his ears, and the first betrayal
of it was from the lips of Chat-oue, when, in his cups, he
unexpectedly invited the schoolmaster to leave Grande Pointe.

After that, even the unconscious schoolmaster could feel the faint
chill of estrangement. But he laid it not to his work, but to his
personal unloveliness, and said to 'Mian he did not doubt if he were
more engaging there would not be so many maidens kept at the wheel and
loom in the priceless hours of school, or so many strapping youths
sent, all unlettered, to the sugar-kettles of the coast plantations
what time M'sieu' Walleece big-in to gryne.

"'Tain't dat," said 'Mian. He had intended to tell the true reason