“The schoolmaster therein alluded—’tis me.”
“Oh!” cried the villager joyously, “maître d’école!—schooltitcher!”
“But,” said the stranger, “not worthy the title.” He accepted gratefully the hand of one and then of the other.
“Walk een!” said Maximian, “all hand’, walk een house.” They went, Indian file, across the road, down a sinuous footpath, over a stile, and up to his little single-story unpainted house, and tramped in upon the railed galérie.
“Et M’sieu’ Le Bourgeois,” said the host, as the schoolmaster accepted a split-bottomed chair, “he’s big-in to gryne?”
Within this ground-floor veranda—chief appointment of all Acadian homes—the traveller accepted a drink of water in a blue tumbler, brought by the meek wife. The galérie just now was scattered with the husband’s appliances for making Périque tobacco into “carats”—the carat-press. Its small, iron-ratcheted, wooden windlass extended along the top rail of the balustrade across one of the galérie’s ends. Lines of half-inch grass rope, for wrapping the carats into diminished bulk and solid shape, lay along under foot. Beside one of the doors, in deep hickory baskets, were the parcels of cured tobacco swaddled in cotton cloths and ready for the torture of ropes and windlass. From the joists overhead hung the pods of tobacco-seed for next year’s planting.
CHAPTER III.
THE HANDSHAKING.
There was news in Grande Pointe. The fair noon sky above, with its peaceful flocks of clouds; the solemn, wet forest round about; the harvested fields; the dishevelled, fragrant fallows; the reclining, ruminating cattle; the little chapel of St. Vincent de Paul in the midst, open for mass once a fortnight, for a sermon in French four times a year,—these were not more tranquil in the face of the fact that a schoolmaster had come to Grande Pointe to stay than outwardly appeared the peaceful-minded villagers. Yet as the tidings floated among the people, touching and drifting on like thistle-down, they were stirred within, and came by ones, by twos, slow-stepping, diffidently smiling, to shake hands with the young great man. They wiped their own before offering them—the men on their strong thighs, the women on their aprons. Children came, whose courage would carry them no nearer than the galérie’s end or front edge, where they lurked and hovered, or gazed through the balustrade, or leaned against a galérie post and rubbed one brown bare foot upon another and crowded each other’s shoulders without assignable cause, or lopped down upon the grass and gazed from a distance.