mouth six
years of age improvised the following tale, which was listened to by
blue eyes aged four and five years:--

"There were three little cocks who owned a country where there were
a great many flowers. They plucked the flowers and put them in their
pockets. After that they plucked the leaves and put them in their
playthings. There was a wolf in that country; there was a great deal of
forest; and the wolf was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks."

And this other poem:--

"There came a blow with a stick.

"It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat.

"It was not good for her; it hurt her.

"Then a lady put Punchinello in prison."

It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent
was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heart-breaking
saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured
in her corner:--

"As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!"

There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the
corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The
big big girls--those over ten years of age--called her Agathocles.

The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square form, which
received no light except through a vaulted cloister on a level with the
garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. All
the places round about furnished their contingent of insects.

Each of its four corners had received, in the language of the pupils,
a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar
corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner.

Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly esteemed. It was not
so cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to
the boarding-school, and there served as in the old College Mazarin
to distinguish four nations. Every pupil belonged to one of these four
nations according to the corner of the refectory in which she sat at
meals. One day Monseigneur the Archbishop while making his pastoral
visit saw a pretty little rosy girl with beautiful golden hair enter the
class-room through which he was passing.

He inquired of another pupil, a charming brunette with rosy cheeks, who
stood near him:--

"Who is that?"

"She is a spider, Monseigneur."

"Bah! And that one yonder?"

"She is a cricket."

"And that one?"

"She is a caterpillar."

"Really! and yourself?"

"I am a wood-louse, Monseigne