the wrong way every morning after prayers, by dropping something,
or sniffling, or sneezing. Therefore, while they distractedly got
together books, slates, and copy-books, their infantile eyes found
time to dart deadly reproaches toward the corner of penitence, and
their little lips, still shaped from their first nourishment, pouted
anything but sympathy for the occupant of it.

Indeed, it would have been a most startling unreality to have ever
entered Madame Joubert's room and not seen Pupasse in that corner, on
that stool, her tall figure shooting up like a post, until her tall,
pointed _bonnet d' âne_ came within an inch or two of the ceiling.
It was her hoop-skirt that best testified to her height. It was the
period of those funnel-shaped hoop-skirts that spread out with such
nice mathematical proportions, from the waist down, that it seemed
they must have emanated from the brains of astronomers, like the
orbits, and diameters, and other things belonging to the heavenly
bodies. Pupasse could not have come within three feet of the wall with
her hoop-skirt distended. To have forced matters was not to be thought
of an instant. So even in her greatest grief and indignation, she had
to pause before the three-legged black stool, and gather up steel
after steel of her circumference in her hands behind, until her calico
skirt careened and flattened; and so she could manage to accommodate
herself to the limited space of her punishment, the circles drooping
far over her feet as she stood there, looking like the costumed stick
of a baby's rattle.

Her thinness continued into her face, which, unfortunately, had
nothing in the way of toilet to assist it. Two little black eyes fixed
in the sides of a mere fence of a nose, and a mouth with the shape and
expression of all mouths made to go over sharp-pointed teeth planted