under the beds. At dawn--it was the very morning when the long
vacation began--he had pulled the string and skedaddled down the three
flights of stairs with this frightful tail of crockery bounding and
smashing to pieces behind him.

At the recollection of this last incident, Claude remained grinning
from ear to ear, his brush suspended in mid-air. 'That brute of a
Pouillaud!' he laughed. 'And so he has written to you. What is he
doing now?'

'Why, nothing at all, old man,' answered Sandoz, seating himself more
comfortably on the cushions. 'His letter is idiotic. He is just
finishing his law studies, and he will inherit his father's practice
as a solicitor. You ought to see the style he has already assumed--all
the idiotic austerity of a philistine, who has turned over a new
leaf.'

They were silent once more until Sandoz added, 'You see, old boy, we
have been protected against that sort of thing.'

Then they relapsed again into reminiscences, but such as made their
hearts thump; the remembrance of the many happy days they had spent
far away from the college, in the open air and the full sunlight. When
still very young, and only in the sixth form, the three inseparables
had become passionately fond of taking long walks. The shortest
holidays were eagerly seized upon to tramp for miles and miles; and,
getting bolder as they grew up, they finished by scouring the whole of
the country-side, by making journeys that sometimes lasted for days.
They slept where they could, in the cleft of a rock, on some
threshing-floor, still burning hot, where the straw of the beaten corn