r,
the little six-year-old monkey, practiced by himself, all unawares.
He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the large white
butterfly goes to the cabbage and the red admiral to the thistle. He
looked and inquired, drawn by a curiosity whereof heredity did not know
the secret. He bore within him the germ of a faculty unknown to his
family; he kept alive a glimmer that was foreign to the ancestral
hearth. What will become of that infinitesimal spark of childish fancy?
It will die out, beyond a doubt, unless education intervene, giving it
the fuel of example, fanning it with the breath of experience. In that
case, schooling will explain what heredity leaves unexplained. This is
what we will examine in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI. MY SCHOOLING

I am back in the village, in my father's house. I am now seven years
old; and it is high time that I went to school. Nothing could have
turned out better: the master is my godfather. What shall I call the
room in which I was to become acquainted with the alphabet? It would
be difficult to find the exact word, because the room served for every
purpose. It was at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining room
and, at times, a chicken house and a piggery. Palatial schools were not
dreamt of in those days; any wretched hovel was thought good enough.

A broad fixed ladder led to the floor above. Under the ladder stood
a big bed in a boarded recess. What was there upstairs? I never quite
knew. I would see the master sometimes bring down an armful of hay for
the ass, sometimes a basket of potatoes which the housewife emptied into
the pot in which the little porkers' food was cooked. It must have been
a loft of sorts, a storehouse of provisions for man and beast. Those two
apartments composed the whole building.

To return to the lower one, the schoolroom: a window faces south, the
only window in the house, a low, narrow window whose frame you can touch
at the same time with your head and both your shoulders. This sunny
aperture is the only lively spot in the dwelling, it overlooks the
greater part of the village, which straggles along the slopes of a
slanting valley. In the window recess is the master's little table.

The opposite wall contains a niche in which stands a gleaming copper
pail full of water. Here the parched children can relieve their thirst
when they please, with a cup left within their reach. At the top of the
niche are a few shelves bright