tender care of an
old man who was devoted to him, used to meditating in the sunshine, he
found it very hard to submit to college rules, to walk in the ranks, to
live within the four walls of a room where eighty boys were sitting
in silence on wooden forms each in front of his desk. His senses were
developed to such perfection as gave them the most sensitive keenness,
and every part of him suffered from this life in common.

The effluvia that vitiated the air, mingled with the odors of a
classroom that was never clean, nor free from the fragments of our
breakfasts or snacks, affected his sense of smell, the sense which,
being more immediately connected than the others with the nerve-centers
of the brain, must, when shocked, cause invisible disturbance to the
organs of thought.

Besides these elements of impurity in the atmosphere, there were
lockers in the classrooms in which the boys kept their miscellaneous
plunder--pigeons killed for fete days, or tidbits filched from the
dinner-table. In each classroom, too, there was a large stone slab, on
which two pails full of water were kept standing, a sort of sink, where
we every morning washed our faces and hands, one after another, in the
master's presence. We then passed on to a table, where women combed and
powdered our hair. Thus the place, being cleaned but once a day before
we were up, was always more or less dirty. In spite of numerous windows
and lofty doors, the air was constantly fouled by the smells from the
washing-place, the hairdressing, the lockers, and the thousand messes
made by the boys, to say nothing of their eighty closely packed bodies.
And this sort of _humus_, mingling with the mud we brought in from the
playing-yard, produced a suffocatingly pestilent muck-heap.

The loss of the fresh and fragrant country air in which he had hitherto
lived, the change of habits and strict discipline, combined to depress
Lambert. With his elbow on his desk and his head supported on his left
hand, he spent the hours of study gazing at the trees in the court or
the clouds in the sky; he seemed to be thinking of his lessons; but
the master, seeing his pen motionless, or the sheet before him still a
blank, would call out:

"Lambert, you are doing nothing!"

This "_you are doing nothing_!" was a pin-thrust that wounded Louis to
the quick. And then he never earned the rest of the play-time; he always
had impositions to write. The imposition, a punishment which varies
a