opies with curlicue birds, he shaved the notabilities
of the place: the mayor, the parish priest, the notary. Our master was a
bell ringer. A wedding or a christening interrupted the lessons: he had
to ring a peal. A gathering storm gave us a holiday: the great bell must
be tolled to ward off the lightning and the hail. Our master was a choir
singer. With his mighty voice, he filled the church when he led the
Magnificat at vespers. Our master wound up and regulated the village
clock. This was his proudest function. Giving a glance at the sun, to
ascertain the time more or less nearly, he would climb to the top of
the steeple, open a huge cage of rafters and find himself in a maze of
wheels and springs whereof the secret was known to him alone.

With such a school and such a master and such examples, what will become
of my embryo tastes, as yet so imperceptible? In that environment, they
seem bound to perish, stifled for ever. Yet no, the germ has life;
it works in my veins, never to leave them again. It finds nourishment
everywhere, down to the cover of my penny alphabet, embellished with
a crude picture of a pigeon which I study and contemplate much more
zealously than the A B C. Its round eye, with its circlet of dots, seems
to smile upon me. Its wing, of which I count the feathers one by one,
tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me
to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded
with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it
takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print
of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles
me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit
quietly on my bench and wait more or less till school is over.

School out of doors has other charms. When the master takes us to kill
the snails in the box borders, I do not always scrupulously fulfil my
office as an exterminator. My heel sometimes hesitates before coming
down upon the handful which I have gathered. They are so pretty! Just
think, there are yellow ones and pink, white ones and brown, all with
dark spiral streaks. I fill my pockets with the handsomest, so as to
feast my eyes on them at my leisure.

On hay making days in the master's field, I strike up an acquaintance
with the frog. Flayed and stuck at the end of a split stick, he serves
as bait to tempt the crayfish to come out of his retr