The Pupil Teacher: Avignon 



bright, full of animation and renewed life. 

 It was a sudden metamorphoses." 



At the Normal College of Vaucluse it was 

 not the lectures given by the masters that 

 transformed the abode of shades or the 

 bears' cage into a centre of light and life for 

 the budding biologist. It was something bet- 

 ter than that. By good fortune the director 

 of the College was broad-minded enough to 

 allow him to employ in his own fashion all 

 the time that was left to him after he had 

 prepared his lessons and his exercises. We 

 may imagine that he did not loiter over his 

 classics. The school programme, for that 

 matter, was not very heavy; the orthographic 

 difficulties which complicated most of the ex- 

 ercises of the future schoolmasters were mere 

 play to the ex-Latinist of the Rodez lycee. 

 And u while all around him dictated pas- 

 sages were being minutely scanned with much 

 searching of the dictionary, he examined, in 

 the secrecy of his desk, the fruit of the ole- 

 ander, the flower of the snapdragon, the sting 

 of a Wasp, the wing-cover of a gardener- 

 beetle." Thus he treated himself to a lec- 

 ture of his own fashion whose charm and 

 fascination greatly exceeded that of anything 

 that the college could teach him. 



So much so that he left the College more 

 77 



