packed off to America as, centuries before, their ancestors had gone to England.
Finally, the impulse spread to the district about Antwerp.
For a long time past the dockers, working on the very banks of the river from which heavy cargoes of exiles, penned up like sheep, were constantly departing, resisted the general enthusiasm. Suspicious and skeptical, they had no desire to fatten with their carcasses the land of the celebrated guano, after having given up their last farthing to the emigration agents, whom they saw swelling and prospering all around them, leeches fattening upon the blood of fools.
Previously, the departure of a peasant or of a laborer would have stupefied the whole quarter or the whole parish. Such a thing would have been considered an act of desperation, an apostasy, the deed of an unnatural being. The only people capable of such an act were occasional unskilled laborers, farm-hands who had been dismissed everywhere, riff-raff who, no longer knowing to which baes to hire out, ended, under the influence of a last debauch, by selling themselves to the crimp who enlisted volunteers for the Dutch army in the East Indies.
But now expatriation began to enter into the customs of respectable people. By the hundreds, urban and rural folk, from the banks of the Scheldt, from the waste dunes of the Campine, navvies from the Polder, brush-trussers of Bruyere, fled the land as if pursued by the surge of an occult inundation.
A restlessness beneath the ancestral roof, a distrust of the good will of the native land, a nomadic impatience, an instinctive need for change penetrated and consumed the most distant and lonely localities.
