ervants
employed in changing the plates, setting down the dishes, handing the
bread, with the tours of inspection of the masters, made this refectory
at Vendome a scene unique in its way, and the amazement of visitors.

To make our life more tolerable, deprived as we were of all
communication with the outer world and of family affection, we were
allowed to keep pigeons and to have gardens. Our two or three hundred
pigeon-houses, with a thousand birds nesting all round the outer wall,
and above thirty garden plots, were a sight even stranger than our
meals. But a full account of the peculiarities which made the college at
Vendome a place unique in itself and fertile in reminiscences to those
who spent their boyhood there, would be weariness to the reader. Which
of us all but remembers with delight, notwithstanding the bitterness
of learning, the eccentric pleasures of that cloistered life? The
sweetmeats purchased by stealth in the course of our walks, permission
obtained to play cards and devise theatrical performances during the
holidays, such tricks and freedom as were necessitated by our seclusion;
then, again, our military band, a relic of the cadets; our academy,
our chaplain, our Father professors, and all our games permitted or
prohibited, as the case might be; the cavalry charges on stilts, the
long slides made in winter, the clatter of our clogs; and, above all,
the trading transactions with "the shop" set up in the courtyard itself.

This shop was kept by a sort of cheap-jack, of whom big and little
boys could procure--according to his prospectus--boxes, stilts, tools,
Jacobin pigeons, and Nuns, Mass-books--an article in small demand
--penknives, paper, pens, pencils, ink of all colors, balls and marbles;
in short, the whole catalogue of the most treasured possessions of boys,
including everything from sauce for the pigeons we were obliged to kill
off, to the earthenware pots in which we set aside the rice from supper
to be eaten at next morning's breakfast. Which of us was so unhappy as
to have forgotten how his heart beat at the sight of this booth, open
periodically during play-hours on Sundays, to which we went, each in his
turn, to spend his little pocket-money; while the smallness of the sum
allowed by our parents for these minor pleasures required us to make a
choice among all the objects that appealed so strongly to our desires?
Did ever a young wife, to whom her husband, during the first days of
happ