he schoolmaster should live close to the schoolhouse.
There was no demand for its key.

Not of that schoolhouse! A hundred feet length by twenty-five breadth,
of earth-floored, clapboard-roofed, tumbling shed, rudely walled with
cypress split boards,--_pieux_,--planted endwise in the earth, like
palisades, a hand-breadth space between every two, and sunlight and
fresh air and the gleams of green fields coming in; the scores of
little tobacco-presses that had stood in ranks on the hard earth
floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco
that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor
left; bold gaps here and there in the _pieux_, made by that mild
influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and
doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and
five or six desks, strong, home-made, sixty-four pounders.

Life had broadened with Claude in two directions. On one side opened,
fair and noble, the acquaintanceship of Bonaventure Deschamps, a man
who had seen the outside world, a man of books, of learning, a man who
could have taught even geography, had there been any one to learn it;
and on the other side, like a garden of roses and spices, the
schoolmateship of Sidonie Le Blanc. To you and me she would have
seemed the merest little brown sprout of a thing, almost nothing but
two big eyes--like a little owl. To Claude it seemed as though nothing
older or larger could be so exactly in the prime of beauty; the path
to learning was the widest, floweriest, fragrantest path he had ever
trod.

Sidonie did not often speak with him. At recess she usually staid at
her desk, studying, quite alone but for Bonaventure silently busy at
his, and Claude himself, sitting farther away, whenever the teacher
did not see him and drive him to the playground. If he would only
drive Sidonie out! But he never did.

One day, after quite a contest of learning, and as the hour of
dismission was scattering the various groups across the green, Toutou,
the little brother who was grand for his age, said to Claude, hanging
timidly near Sidonie:--

"_Alle est plus_ smart' _que vous_." (She is smarter than you.)

Whereupon Sidonie made haste to say in their Acadian French, "Ah!
Master Toutou, you forget we went to school to our dear aunt. And
besides, I am small and look young, but I am nearly a year older than
Claude." She had wanted to be kind, but that was the first thorn