ish was satisfied. It was the end
of the scholastic year. A stage ahead in the regular work, I had just
obtained my certificate. I was free. A few weeks remain before the
holidays. Shall I go and spend them out of doors, in all the gaiety of
my eighteen summers? No, I will spend them at the school which, for two
years past, has provided me with an untroubled roof and my daily crust.
I will wait until a post is found for me. Employ my willing service as
you think fit, do with me what you will: as long as I can study, I am
indifferent to the rest.

The principal of the school, the soul of kindness, has grasped my
passion for knowledge. He encourages me in my determination; he proposes
to make me renew my acquaintance with Horace and Virgil, so long since
forgotten. He knows Latin, he does; he will rekindle the dead spark
by making me translate a few passages. He does more: he lends me an
Imitation with parallel texts in Latin and Greek. With the first text,
which I am almost able to read, I will puzzle out the second and thus
increase the small vocabulary which I acquired in the days when I was
translating Aesop's Fables. It will be all the better for my future
studies. What luck! Board and lodging, ancient poetry, the classical
languages, all the good things at once!

I did better still. Our science master--the real, not the honorary
one--who came twice a week to discourse of the rule of three and
the properties of the triangle, had the brilliant idea of letting
us celebrate the end of the school year with a feast of learning. He
promised to show us oxygen. As a colleague of the chemist in the grammar
school, he obtained leave to take us to the famous laboratory and there
to handle the object of his lesson under our very eyes. Oxygen, yes,
oxygen, the all-consuming gas; that was what we were to see on the
morrow. I could not sleep all night for thinking of it.

Thursday afternoon came at last. As soon as the chemistry lesson is
over, we were to go for a walk to Les Angles, the pretty village over
yonder, perched on a steep rock. We were therefore in our Sunday best,
our out-of-doors clothes: black frock coats and tall hats. The whole
school was there, some thirty of us, in the charge of an usher, who knew
as little as we did of the things which we were about to see. We crossed
the threshold of the laboratory, not without excitement. I entered a
great nave with a Gothic roof, an old, bare church through which one's
voi