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 illiteracy, 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.