ergy to run ahead and get home again in
spite of pain, so sensitively afraid of laughter or of pity--two forms
of scorn--is the still tender soul at that age.

At school, as in social life, the strong despise the feeble without
knowing in what true strength consists.

Nor was this all. No gloves. If by good hap a boy's parents, the
infirmary nurse, or the headmaster gave gloves to a particularly
delicate lad, the wags or the big boys of the class would put them on
the stove, amused to see them dry and shrivel; or if the gloves escaped
the marauders, after getting wet they shrunk as they dried for want
of care. No, gloves were impossible. Gloves were a privilege, and boys
insist on equality.

Louis Lambert fell a victim to all these varieties of torment. Like
many contemplative men, who, when lost in thought, acquire a habit of
mechanical motion, he had a mania for fidgeting with his shoes, and
destroyed them very quickly. His girlish complexion, the skin of his
ears and lips, cracked with the least cold. His soft, white hands grew
red and swollen. He had perpetual colds. Thus he was a constant
sufferer till he became inured to school-life. Taught at last by cruel
experience, he was obliged to "look after his things," to use the school
phrase. He was forced to take care of his locker, his desk, his clothes,
his shoes; to protect his ink, his books, his copy-paper, and his pens
from pilferers; in short, to give his mind to the thousand details of
our trivial life, to which more selfish and commonplace minds devoted
such strict attention--thus infallibly securing prizes for "proficiency"
and "good conduct"--while they were overlooked by a boy of the highest
promise, who, under the hand of an almost divine imagination, gave
himself up with rapture to the flow of his ideas.

This was not all. There is a perpetual struggle going on between the
masters and the boys, a struggle without truce, to be compared with
nothing else in the social world, unless it be the resistance of
the opposition to the ministry in a representative government. But
journalists and opposition speakers are probably less prompt to take
advantage of a weak point, less extreme in resenting an injury, and less
merciless in their mockery than boys are in regard to those who rule
over them. It is a task to put angels out of patience. An unhappy
class-master must then not be too severely blamed, ill-paid as he is,
and consequently not too competent, if he