vegetable parings.

Then came comical reminiscences; the sudden recollection of practical
jokes, at which they shook with laughter after all those years. Oh!
the morning when they had burned the shoes of Mimi-la-Mort, _alias_
the Skeleton Day Boarder, a lank lad, who smuggled snuff into the
school for the whole of the form. And then that winter evening when
they had bagged some matches lying near the lamp in the chapel, in
order to smoke dry chestnut leaves in reed pipes. Sandoz, who had been
the ringleader on that occasion, now frankly avowed his terror; the
cold perspiration that had come upon him when he had scrambled out of
the choir, wrapt in darkness. And again there was the day when Claude
had hit upon the sublime idea of roasting some cockchafers in his desk
to see whether they were good to eat, as people said they were. So
terrible had been the stench, so dense the smoke that poured from the
desk, that the usher had rushed to the water pitcher, under the
impression that the place was on fire. And then their marauding
expeditions; the pillaging of onion beds while they were out walking;
the stones thrown at windows, the correct thing being to make the
breakage resemble a well-known geographical map. Also the Greek
exercises, written beforehand in large characters on the blackboard,
so that every dunce might easily read them though the master remained
unaware of it; the wooden seats of the courtyard sawn off and carried
round the basin like so many corpses, the boys marching in procession
and singing funeral dirges. Yes! that had been a capital prank.
Dubuche, who played the priest, had tumbled into the basin while
trying to scoop some water into his cap, which was to serve as a holy
water pot. But the most comical and amusing of all the pranks had
perhaps been that devised by Pouillaud, who one night had fastened all
the unmentionable crockery of the dormitory to one long string passed