However, three great bursts of cheers rang out. A flight of crows, skimming aloft across the cloudless sky, took fright with much noisy croaking. Immediately the minister's speech had finished, the Philharmonic Society had begun to play again, a signal being given from the tent; while all the ladies sprang up, anxious to miss nothing of the ceremony. The guests were smiling around Rougon with delighted faces. The mayor, the public prosecutor, and the colonel of the seventy-eighth infantry were wagging their heads approvingly while listening to the deputy, who expressed his admiration of his excellency in tones which, although subdued, were yet loud enough to reach the minister's ears. However, it was the chief surveyor of bridges and highways who manifested the greatest enthusiasm. He displayed an extraordinary amount of obsequiousness, and seemed quite thunderstruck by the great man's magnificent language. 'Would your excellency do me the honour to follow me?' now asked M. Kahn, whose fat face was perspiring with pleasure. The concluding part of the ceremony was at hand. His excellency was about to fire the first mine. Orders had just been given to the gang of navvies in new blouses. The men preceded the minister and M. Kahn into the cutting and drew themselves up in two lines at the far end. Then a foreman who held a piece of lighted rope presented it to Rougon. The officials, who had remained in the tent, craned their heads forward. Everyone waited anxiously. The Philharmonic Society was still playing. 'Will it make very much noise?' the head-master's wife inquired, with an uneasy smile, of one of the public prosecutor's assessors. 'That depends upon the nature of the rock,' hastily interposed the President of the Tribunal of Commerce, who at once entered upon various mineralogical explanations. 'I shall stuff up my ears,' murmured the eldest of the three daughters of the conservator of rivers and forests. Rougon felt that he was looking very foolish, standing in the midst of all these people with the burning rope in his hand. Up above, on the hill crests, the ruined windmills were creaking louder than ever in the warm sunlight. Then he hastened to light the fuse, the end of which, lying between two stones, was pointed out to him by the foreman. One of the navvies immediately blew a long blast on a horn, and all the gang hurried off, while M. Kahn hastily pulled his excellency back into the tent, manifesting much anxious solicitude for his safety. 'Well, why doesn't it go off?' stammered the registrar, who was blinking nervously, and would very much have liked to close his ears, as the ladies were doing.