the blackboard, so that every dunce might easily read
them though the master remained unaware of it; the wooden seats of the
courtyard sawn off and carried round the basin like so many corpses, the
boys marching in procession and singing funeral dirges. Yes! that had
been a capital prank. Dubuche, who played the priest, had tumbled into
the basin while trying to scoop some water into his cap, which was to
serve as a holy water pot. But the most comical and amusing of all the
pranks had perhaps been that devised by Pouillaud, who one night had
fastened all the unmentionable crockery of the dormitory to one long
string passed under the beds. At dawn--it was the very morning when the
long vacation began--he had pulled the string and skedaddled down the
three flights of stairs with this frightful tail of crockery bounding
and smashing to pieces behind him.

At the recollection of this last incident, Claude remained grinning from
ear to ear, his brush suspended in mid-air. 'That brute of a Pouillaud!'
he laughed. 'And so he has written to you. What is he doing now?'

'Why, nothing at all, old man,' answered Sandoz, seating himself
more comfortably on the cushions. 'His letter is idiotic. He is just
finishing his law studies, and he will inherit his father's practice as
a solicitor. You ought to see the style he has already assumed--all the
idiotic austerity of a philistine, who has turned over a new leaf.'

They were silent once more until Sandoz added, 'You see, old boy, we
have been protected against that sort of thing.'

Then they relapsed again into reminiscences, but such as made their
hearts thump; the remembrance of the many happy days they had spent far
away from the college, in the open air and the full sunlight. When
still very young, and only in the sixth form, the three inseparables
had become passionately fond of taking long walks. The shortest holidays
were eagerly seized upon to tramp for miles and miles; and, getting
bolder as they grew up, they finished by scouring the whole of the
country-side, by making journeys that sometimes lasted for days. They
slept where they could, in the cleft of a rock, on some threshing-floor,
still burning hot, where the straw of the beaten corn made them a soft
couch, or in some deserted hut, the ground of which they covered with
wild thyme and lavender. Those were flights far from the everyday world,
when they became absorbed in healthy mother Nature herself, adoring
trees