The Life of the Fly 



lion; he proposes to make me renew my ac- 

 quaintance with Horace and Virgil, so long 

 since forgotten. He knows Latin, he does; 

 he will rekindle the dead spark by making me 

 translate a few passages. He does more : he 

 lends me an Imitation with parallel texts in 

 Latin and Greek. With the first text, which 

 I am almost able to read, I will puzzle out 

 the second and thus increase the small vocabu- 

 lary which I acquired in the days when I was 

 translating iEsop's Fables. It will be all the 

 better for my future studies. What luck! 

 Board and lodging, ancient poetry, the classi- 

 cal languages, all the good things at once ! 



I did better still. Our science-master — the 

 real, not the honorary one — who came twice 

 a week to discourse of the rule of three and 

 the properties of the triangle, had the brilliant 

 idea of letting us celebrate the end of the 

 school-year with a feast of learning. He 

 promised to show us oxygen. As a colleague 

 of the chemist in the grammar-school, he ob- 

 tained leave to take us to the famous labora- 

 tory and there to handle the object of his 

 lesson under our very eyes. Oxygen, yes, 

 oxygen, the all-consuming gas; that w r as what 

 we were to see on the morrow. I could not 

 sleep all night for thinking of it. 



432 



