d about at home--such mastery of
English, such satisfactory results in pronunciation and emphasis!
Reading just as they talked? Oh, no, a thousand times no! The school's
remoter light, its secondary influences, slowly spreading, but so
slowly that only the eyes of enmity could see its increase. There were
murmurs and head-shakings; but the thirteenth Sunday of the year's
first quarter came, and the sermon whose withholding had been
threatened was preached. And on the thirteenth Monday there was
Bonaventure, still moving quietly across the green toward the
schoolhouse with the children all about him. But a few days later the
unexpected happened.

By this time Claude's father, whose teacher, you remember, was Claude,
had learned to read. One day a surveyor, who had employed him as a
guide, seeing the Acadian laboring over a fragment of rural newspaper,
fell into conversation with him as they sat smoking by their
camp-fire, and presently caught some hint of St. Pierre's aspirations
for himself and his son.

"So there's a public school at Grande Pointe, is there?"

"Oh, yass; fine school; hondred feet long! and fine titcher; splendid
titcher; titch English."

"Well, well!" laughed the surveyor. "Well, the next thing will be a
railroad."

St. Pierre's eyes lighted up.

"You t'ink!"

"Why, yes; you can't keep railroads away from a place long, once you
let in the public school and teach English."

"You t'ink dass good?"

"What, a railroad? Most certainly. It brings immigration."

"Whass dat--'migrash'n?"

The surveyor explained.

The next time St. Pierre came to Grande Pointe--to sell some fish--he
came armed with two great words for the final overthrow of all
opponents of enlightenment: "Rellroad!--'Migrash'n!"

They had a profound and immediate effect--exactly the opposite of what
he had expected.

The school had just been dismissed; the children were still in sight,
dispersing this way and that. Sidonie lingered a moment at her desk,
putting it in order; Claude, taking all the time he could, was getting
his canoe-paddle from a corner; Crebiche was waiting, by the master's
command, to repair some default of the day; and Toutou, outside on his
knees in the grass catching grasshoppers, was tarrying for his sister;
when four or five of the village's best men came slowly and
hesitatingly in. It required no power of divination for even the
pre-occupied schoolmaster to guess the nature of their errand. 'Mian
w