ich case I owe him some compensation: 'Would you
like me,' I will ask him, 'would you like me to tell you how I acquired
sufficient algebra to master the logarithmic systems and how I became
a surveyor of Spiders' webs? Would you? It will give us a rest from
natural history.'

I seem to catch a sign of acquiescence. The story of my village school,
visited by the chicks and the porkers, has been received with some
indulgence; why should not my harsh school of solitude possess its
interest as well? Let us try to describe it. And who knows? Perhaps,
in doing so, I shall revive the courage of some other poor derelict
hungering after knowledge.

I was denied the privilege of learning with a master. I should be wrong
to complain. Solitary study has its advantages: it does not cast you in
the official mould; it leaves you all your originality. Wild fruit, when
it ripens, has a different taste from hothouse produce: it leaves on
a discriminating palate a bittersweet flavor whose virtue is all the
greater for the contrast. Yes, if it were in my power, I would start
afresh, face to face with my only counselor, the book itself, not always
a very lucid one; I would gladly resume my lonely watches, my struggles
with the darkness whence, at last, a glimmer appears as I continue to
explore it; I should retraverse the irksome stages of yore, stimulated
by the one desire that has never failed me, the desire of learning and
of afterwards bestowing my mite of knowledge on others.

When I left the normal school, my stock of mathematics was of the
scantiest. How to extract a square root, how to calculate and prove the
surface of a sphere: these represented to me the culminating points of
the subject. Those terrible logarithms, when I happened to open a
table of them, made my head swim, with their columns of figures; actual
fright, not unmixed with respect, overwhelmed me on the very threshold
of that arithmetical cave. Of algebra I had no knowledge whatever. I had
heard the name; and the syllables represented to my poor brain the whole
whirling legion of the abstruse.

Besides, I felt no inclination to decipher the alarming hieroglyphics.
They made one of those indigestible dishes which we confidently extol
without touching them. I greatly preferred a fine line of Virgil, whom I
was now beginning to understand; and I should have been surprised
indeed had any one told me that, for long years to come, I should be an
enthusiastic student o