stream--"

Then he stopped short, the tap was closed. Godard did not know his
lesson, and he, too, was condemned to remain on guard under the sycamore
during recess.

After pupil Godard came pupil Grosdidier; then Blanc, then Moreau
(Gaston), then Moreau (Ernest), then Malepert; then another, and another,
who babbled with the same intelligence and volubility, with the same
piping voice, this cruel and wonderful fable. It was as irritating and
monotonous as a fine rain. All the pupils in the "ninth preparatory" were
disgusted for fifteen years, at least, with this most exquisite of French
poems.

Little Amedee wanted to cry; he listened with stupefaction blended with
fright as the scholars by turns unwound their bobbins. To think that
to-morrow he must do the same! He never would be able. M. Tavernier
frightened him very much, too. The yellow-complexioned usher, seated
nonchalantly in his armchair, was not without pretension; in spite of his
black coat with the "take-me-out-of-pawn" air, polished his nails, and
only opened his mouth at times to utter a reprimand or pronounce sentence
of punishment.

This was school, then! Amedee recalled the pleasant reading-lessons that
the eldest of the Gerards had given him--that good Louise, so wise and
serious and only ten years old, pointing out his letters to him in a
picture alphabet with a knitting-needle, always so patient and kind. The
child was overcome at the very first with a disgust for school, and gazed
through the window which lighted the room at the noiselessly moving,
large, indented leaves of the melancholy sycamore.

CHAPTER III

PAPA AND MAMMA GERARD

One, two, three years rolled by without anything very remarkable
happening to the inhabitants of the fifth story.

The quarter had not changed, and it still had the appearance of a
suburban faubourg. They had just erected, within gunshot of the house
where the Violettes and Gerards lived, a large five-story building, upon
whose roof still trembled in the wind the masons' withered bouquets. But
that was all. In front of them, on the lot "For Sale," enclosed by rotten
boards, where one could always see tufts of nettles and a goat tied to a
stake, and upon the high wall above which by the end of April the lilacs
hung in their perfumed clusters, the rains had not effaced this brutal
declaration of love, scraped with a knife in the plaster: "When Melie
wishes she can have me," and signed "Eugene."

Three y