Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/264

236 a poignant and sullen resolution, consented to cut themselves off forever from their native land.

For a long time their faithful hearts had resisted. As long as they had succeeded in being able to divide among them a crust of black bread and a porringer full of potatoes they had been inflexible, stinting themselves, as strong in their attachment to the land as Christians are in the faith; but when the day came when the women and even the children had nothing to eat, their heroism had given away, and one morning they had resolved upon exile as if they were resigning themselves to suicide.

It is all over. The household leaves the ancestral farm; its head gives up the leased land, sells the cattle, horses, the wagons, the agricultural tools!…

The defeat of the most tenacious partisans of the land, of the best among the peasantry, excited the rest of the population and set them in motion; the panic propagated itself from village to village.

Farmers who could have held out for a few years more and withstood the crisis took fright, and sent off their laborers and poor, half-starved wretches. They remembered so many of their richer neighbors, who had always been hoping, who had moved heaven and hell against repeated proof, against chronic distress, until the insufficiency of the crops, aggravated by the competition of transatlantic granaries, reduced them in their old age to taking service on the farms of which they had formerly been the masters.

The far-sighted took their tools and the beasts of burden with them. They went bravely to the fertile fields, the promised lands and eldorados, the kingdoms of Cockaigne ruled over by Prester John, America bursting with grain and fruit, the produce of which, fat