The Schoolmaster: Carpentras 



you please! — I could not hesitate over the expense. 

 A surveyor's chain and stakes, arrows, level, square, 

 and compass were bought with my money. A 

 microscopic graphometer, not much larger than the 

 palm of one's hand and costing perhaps five francs, 

 was provided by the establishment. There was no 

 tripod to it; and I had one made. In short, my 

 equipment was complete. 



And so, when May came, once every week we 

 left the gloomy schoolroom for the fields. It was 

 a regular holiday. The boys disputed for the hon- 

 our of carrying the stakes, divided into bundles of 

 three; and more than one shoulder, as we walked 

 through the town, felt the reflected glory of those 

 erudite rods. I myself — why conceal the fact? — 

 was not without a certain satisfaction as I piously 

 carried that most delicate and precious apparatus, 

 the historic five-franc graphometer. The scene of 

 operations was an untilled, flinty plain, a harmas, 

 as we call it in the district. Here, no curtain 

 of green hedges or shrubs prevented me from keep- 

 ing an eye upon my staff; here — an indispensable 

 condition — I had not the irresistible temptation of 

 the unripe apricots to fear for my scholars. The 

 plain stretched far and wide, covered with nothing 

 but flowering thyme and rounded pebbles. There 

 was ample scope for every imaginable polygon; 

 trapezes and triangles could be combined in all 

 sorts of ways. The inaccessible distances had am- 

 ple elbow-room; and there was even an old ruin, 

 once a pigeon-house, that lent its perpendicular to 

 the graphometer's performances. 



95 



