s, a set of duffers kept out of the more advanced classes and
all at different stages in spelling and grammar. Next year, my school is
divided into two; I have an assistant. A weeding-out takes place in my
crowd of scatterbrains. I keep the older, the more intelligent ones;
the others are to have a term in the preparatory division. From that day
forward, things are different. Curriculum there is none. In those happy
times, the master's personality counted for something; there was no such
thing as the scholastic piston working with the regularity of a machine.
It was left for me to act as I thought fit. Well, what should I do to
make the school earn its title of 'upper primary'?

Why, of course! Among other things, I shall do some chemistry! My
reading has taught me that it does no harm to know a little chemistry,
if you would make your furrows yield a good return. Many of my pupils
come from the country; they will go back to it to improve their land.
Let us show them what the soil is made of and what the plant feeds on.
Others will follow industrial careers; they will become tanners,
metal founders, distillers; they will sell cakes of soap and kegs of
anchovies. Let us show them pickling, soap making, stills, tannin and
metals. Of course, I know nothing about these things, but I shall learn,
all the more so as I shall have to teach them to the boys; and your
schoolboy is a little demon for jeering at the master's hesitation.

As it happens, the college boasts a small laboratory, containing just
what is strictly indispensable: a receiver, a dozen glass balloons, a
few tubes and a niggardly assortment of chemicals. That will do, if I
can have the run of it. But the laboratory is a sanctum reserved for the
use of the sixth form. No one sets foot in it except the professor and
his pupils preparing for their degree. For me, the outsider, to enter
that tabernacle with my band of young imps would be most unseemly; the
rightful occupant would never think of allowing it. I feel it myself:
elementary teaching dare not aspire to such familiarity with the higher
culture. Very well, we will not go there, so long as they will lend me
the things.

I confide my plan to the principal, the supreme dispenser of those
riches. He is a classics man, knows hardly anything of science, at
that time held in no great esteem, and he does not quite understand the
object of my request. I humbly insist and exert my powers of persuasion.
I discreetl