served out to each boy instead of that Spartan
broth--that "brouet noir des Lacedemoniens," as we called it.

Everybody who has lived in France knows how good French butter can
often be--and French bread. We triturated each our pat with
rock-salt and made a round ball of it, and dug a hole in our hunk to
put it in, and ate it in the play-ground with clasp-knives, making
it last as long as we could.

This, and the half-holiday in the afternoon, made Thursday a day to
be marked with a white stone. When you are up at five in summer, at
half past five in the winter, and have had an hour and a half or two
hours' preparation before your first meal at 7.30, French
bread-and-butter is not a bad thing to break your fast with.

Then, from eight till twelve, class--Latin, Greek, French, English,
German--and mathematics and geometry--history, geography, chemistry,
Physics--everything that you must get to know before you can hope to
obtain your degree of Bachelor of Letters or Sciences, or be
admitted to the Polytechnic School, or the Normal, or the Central,
or that of Mines, or that of Roads and Bridges, or the Military
School of St. Cyr, or the Naval School of the Borda. All this was
fifty years ago; of course names of schools may have changed, and
even the sciences themselves.

Then, at twelve, the second breakfast, meat (or salt fish on
Fridays), a dish of vegetables, lentils, red or white beans, salad,
potatoes, etc.; a dessert, which consisted of fruit or cheese, or a
French pudding. This banquet over, a master would stand up in his
place and call for silence, and read out loud the list of boys who
were to be kept in during the play-hour that followed:

"_A la retenue_, Messieurs Maurice, Rapaud, de Villars, Jolivet,
Sponde," etc. Then play till 1.30; and very good play, too;
rounders, which are better and far more complicated in France than
in England; "barres"; "barres traversieres," as rough a game as
football; fly the garter, or "la raie," etc., etc., according to the
season. And then afternoon study, at the summons of that dreadful
bell whose music was so sweet when it rang the hour for meals or
recreation or sleep--so hideously discordant at 5.30 on a foggy
December Monday morning.

Altogether eleven hours work daily and four hours play, and sleep
from nine till five or half past; I find this leaves half an hour
unaccounted for, so I must have made a mistake somewhere. But it all
happened fifty years ago, so it's