It must have been to this utterance that he alluded when at the close of that day he walked, as he supposed, with only birds and grasshoppers for companions, and they grew still, and the turtle-doves began to moan, and he smote his breast and cried: "Ah! rules, rules! how easy to make, likewise break! Oh! the shame, the shame! _If_ Victor Hugo had seen that! And if George Washington! But thou,"--some one else, not mentioned,--"thou sawedst it!" The last word was still on the speaker's lips, when--there beside the path, with heavy eye and drunken frown, stood the father of Crebiche, the son of Catou, the little boy of twenty-five known as Chat-oue. He spoke: "To who is dat you speak? Talk wid de dev'?" Bonaventure murmured a salutation, touched his hat, and passed. Chat-oue moved a little, and delivered a broadside: "Afteh dat, you betteh leave! Yes, you betteh leave Gran' Point'!" "Sir," said Bonaventure, turning with flushed face, "I stay." "Yes," said the other, "dass righ'; you betteh go way and stay. _Magicien_," he added as the schoolmaster moved on, "_sorcier!_--Voudou!--jackass!" What did all this mean? CHAPTER VI. WAR OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT. Catou, it seems, had gone one day to College Point with a pair of wild ducks that he had shot,--first of the season,--and offered them to the priest who preached for Grande Pointe once a quarter. "Catou," said the recipient, in good French but with a cruel hardness of tone, "why does that man out there teach his school in English?" The questioner's intentions were not unkind. He felt a protector's care for his Acadian sheep, whose wants he fancied he, if not he only, understood. He believed a sudden overdose of enlightenment would be to them a real disaster, and he proposed to save them from it by the kind of management they had been accustomed to--they and their fathers--for a thousand years. Catou answered the question only by a timid smile and shrug. The questioner spoke again: