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, but his heart failed him; and when Bonaventure asked what, then, it was, he replied: "Aw, dey don't got no time. Time run so fas',--run like a scared dog. I dunno fo' w'at dey make dat time run so fas' dat way." "O my friend," cried the young schoolmaster, leaping from his chair, "say not that! If God did not make time to p'oceed with rapidness, who would ever do his best?" It was such lessons as this that made the children--Crebiche among them--still gather round the humble master and love to grasp his hand. CHAPTER VII. LOVE AND DUTY.