PART I
CHAPTER I.
ARAIM.
Occasionally they are long-lived, these descendants of the good Joel, who, five hundred and fifty years ago and more lived in this identical region, near the sacred stones of the forest of Karnak. Yes, the descendants of the good Joel are, occasionally, long-lived, seeing that I, Araim, who to-day trace these lines in the seventy-seventh year of my life, saw my grandfather Gildas die fifty-six years ago at the advanced age of ninety-six, after having inscribed in his early youth a few lines in our family archives.
My grandfather Gildas buried his son Goridek, my father. I was then ten years old. Nine years later I lost my grandfather also. A few years after his demise I married. I have survived my wife, Martha, and I have seen my son Jocelyn become, in turn, a father. To-day he has a daughter and two boys. The girl is called Roselyk, she is eighteen; the elder of the two boys, Kervan, is three years his sister's senior; the younger, my pet, Karadeucq, is seventeen.
When you read these lines, as you will some day, my son Jocelyn, you will surely ask:
"What can have been the reason that my great-grandfather Gildas made no other entry in our chronicles than the death of his father Amael? And what can be the reason that my grandfather Goridek wrote not a line? And, finally, what can be the reason that my own father, Araim, waited so long—so very long before fulfilling the wishes of the good Joel?"
To that, my son, I would make this answer:
Your great-grandfather had no particular liking for desks and parchments. Besides, very much after the style of his own father Amael, he liked to postpone for to-morrow whatever he could avoid doing to-day. For the rest, his life of a husbandman was neither less peaceful nor less industrious than that of our fathers since the return of Schanvoch to the cradle of our family, after such a very long line of generations, kept away from Armorica by the hard trials and the slavery that followed in the wake of the Roman conquest. Your great-grandfather was in the habit of saying to my father: