gh the cemetery gates and I waited, much moved by what I
had heard, until the coffin had been lowered into the grave, before I
went up to the poor fellow who was sobbing violently, to press his hand
warmly. He looked at me in surprise through his tears and then said:

"Thank you, monsieur." And I was not sorry that I had followed the
funeral.

THE QUESTION OF LATIN

This subject of Latin that has been dinned into our ears for some time
past recalls to my mind a story--a story of my youth.

I was finishing my studies with a teacher, in a big central town, at the
Institution Robineau, celebrated through the entire province for the
special attention paid there to the study of Latin.

For the past ten years, the Robineau Institute beat the imperial lycee of
the town at every competitive examination, and all the colleges of the
subprefecture, and these constant successes were due, they said, to an
usher, a simple usher, M. Piquedent, or rather Pere Piquedent.

He was one of those middle-aged men quite gray, whose real age it is
impossible to tell, and whose history we can guess at first glance.
Having entered as an usher at twenty into the first institution that
presented itself so that he could proceed to take first his degree of
Master of Arts and afterward the degree of Doctor of Laws, he found
himself so enmeshed in this routine that he remained an usher all his
life. But his love for Latin did not leave him and harassed him like an
unhealthy passion. He continued to read the poets, the prose writers, the
historians, to interpret them and penetrate their meaning, to comment on
them with a perseverance bordering on madness.

One day, the idea came into his head to oblige all the students in his
class to answer him in Latin only; and he persisted in this resolution
until at last they were capable of sustaining an entire conversation with
him just as they would in their mother tongue. He listened to them, as a
leader of an orchestra listens to his musicians rehearsing, and striking
his desk every moment with his ruler, he exclaimed:

"Monsieur Lefrere, Monsieur Lefrere, you are committing a solecism! You
forget the rule.

"Monsieur Plantel, your way of expressing yourself is altogether French
and in no way Latin. You must understand the genius of a language. Look
here, listen to me."

Now, it came to pass that the pupils of the Institution Robineau carried
off, at the end of the year, all the prizes for com