ndfuls of Low Country mud. You might smooth to the utmost the path of
learning, remove every pebble from the track; but then you must finally
insist with decision on the pupil taking your arm and allowing himself
to be led quietly along the prepared road. When I had brought down my
lesson to the lowest level of my dullest pupil's capacity--when I
had shown myself the mildest, the most tolerant of masters--a word of
impertinence, a movement of disobedience, changed me at once into
a despot. I offered then but one alternative--submission and
acknowledgment of error, or ignominious expulsion. This system answered,
and my influence, by degrees, became established on a firm basis. "The
boy is father to the man," it is said; and so I often thought when
looked at my boys and remembered the political history of their
ancestors. Pelet's school was merely an epitome of the Belgian nation.

CHAPTER VIII.

AND Pelet himself? How did I continue to like him? Oh, extremely well!
Nothing could be more smooth, gentlemanlike, and even friendly, than
his demeanour to me. I had to endure from him neither cold neglect,
irritating interference, nor pretentious assumption of superiority. I
fear, however, two poor, hard-worked Belgian ushers in the establishment
could not have said as much; to them the director's manner was
invariably dry, stern, and cool. I believe he perceived once or twice
that I was a little shocked at the difference he made between them and
me, and accounted for it by saying, with a quiet sarcastic smile--

"Ce ne sont que des Flamands--allez!"

And then he took his cigar gently from his lips and spat on the painted
floor of the room in which we were sitting. Flamands certainly they
were, and both had the true Flamand physiognomy, where intellectual
inferiority is marked in lines none can mistake; still they were men,
and, in the main, honest men; and I could not see why their being
aboriginals of the flat, dull soil should serve as a pretext for
treating them with perpetual severity and contempt. This idea, of
injustice somewhat poisoned the pleasure I might otherwise have derived
from Pelet's soft affable manner to myself. Certainly it was agreeable,
when the day's work was over, to find one's employer an intelligent
and cheerful companion; and if he was sometimes a little sarcastic
and sometimes a little too insinuating, and if I did discover that
his mildness was more a matter of appearance than of reality--i