so insane that folks get angry at the mere thought of it, yet it enraptures us and gives us gayety and health, and the courage to achieve victory.  We are opening the road, we are giving the example, we are carrying our dear old France yonder, taking to ourselves a huge expanse of virgin land, which will become a province.  We have already founded a village which in a hundred years will be a great town.  In the colonies no race is more fruitful than the French, though it seems to become barren on its own ancient soil.  Thus we shall swarm and swarm, and fill the world!  So come then, come then, all of you; since here you are set too closely, since you lack air in your little fields and your overheated, pestilence-breeding towns.  There is room for everybody yonder; there are new lands, there is open air that none has breathed, and there is a task to be accomplished which will make all of you heroes, strong, sturdy men, well pleased to live!  Come with me.  I will take the men, I will take all the women who are willing, and you will carve for yourselves other provinces and found other cities for the future glory and power of the great new France.”

He laughed so gayly, he was so handsome, so spirited, so robust, that once again the whole table acclaimed him.  They would certainly not follow him yonder, for all those married couples already had their own nests; and all those young folks were already too strongly rooted to the old land by the ties of their race—­a race which after displaying such adventurous instincts has now fallen asleep, as it were, at its own fireside.  But what a marvellous story it all was—­a story to which big and little alike, had listened in rapture, and which to-morrow would, doubtless, arouse within them a passion for glorious enterprise far away!  The seed of the unknown was sown, and would grow into a crop of fabulous magnitude.

For the moment Benjamin was the only one who cried amid the enthusiasm which drowned his words:  “Yes, yes, I want to live.  Take me, take me with you!”

But Dominique resumed, by way of conclusion:  “And there is one thing, grandfather, which I have not yet told you.  My father has given the name of Chantebled to our farm yonder.  He often tells us how you founded your estate here, in an impulse of far-seeing audacity, although everybody jeered and shrugged their shoulders and declared that you must be mad.  And, yonder, my father has to put up with the same derision, the same contemptuous pity, for people declare that the good Niger will some day sweep away our village, even if a band of prowling natives does not kill and eat us!  But I’m easy in mind about all that, we shall conquer as you conquered, for what seems to be the folly of action is really divine wisdom.  There will be another kingdom of the Froments yonder, another huge Chantebled, of which you and my grandmother will be the ancestors, the distant patriarchs, worshipped like deities. . . .  And I drink to your health, grandfather, and I drink to yours, grandmother, on behalf of your other future people, who will grow up full of spirit under the burning sun of the tropics!”